Manthan – The Introspection

As a society and as educators in the role of parents and teachers alike we need to reflect deeply on some of the following questions:

DO SCHOOLS PROVIDE
A learning centered environment ?

• Is learning a joyful and enriching experience for children or is it a hard duty?
• Is learning about one right answer or about nurturing perspectives and curiosity?
• Do children understand why they are learning what they are learning? Do they relate to it?
• Do children’s interests inform all choices about curriculum, instruction, and scheduling?

ARE TEACHERS
Truely Empowered?

• As an organisation have we empowered teachers to co-create experiences that result in true learning?
• Do they question familiar ways?
• Do they research and study or is there a stifling reliance on text books?
• Is the teaching organised around problems, projects and questions?
• Is it truly interdisciplinary as most of life is?
• Are they punishing with rewards?

IS THE SCHOOL CULTURE
Bringing out the best in everybody?

• Is the culture more focussed on students? weaknesses than their strengths?
• Is the classroom experience about co-operation and self-esteem or comparison and ridicule?
• Has acquiring skills (e.g., arithmetic, vocabulary) come to be over-emphasised rather than be seen as a means to the end of understanding and communicating ideas?
• Do students spend so much time thinking about how well they’re doing that they’re no longer engaged with what they are doing?

IS EDUCATION
A means to an end or an end in itself?

• If education is the journey and the destination, then what needs to be the nature of schools and what kind of children would be nurtured in such schools?

At MSSS, it is our constant endeavour to seek responses to these persistent questions. These are questions and answers which affect all stakeholders – children, parent community, school and society at large – at the most fundamental level.

For us, such questions and responses form the basic edifice upon which we have built our dharma (belief and Value) and karma (doing and praxis). It is our firm conviction to continue asking such and other questions to arrive at the true meaning of education and learning.

We would also like to believe that our sankalpa, dharma and prakriya outlined in the following pages honestly address such questions.