By Bhamy V. Shenoy
Critical Thinking and Education
3 Aug 07 13:20:43 PM - 17 Views | comments rss:
Tags: Critical Thinking how to empower youth to read and judge value of what they read empowering students to thinks and innovate enabling students to participate in social and cultural developments True Education
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Critical thinking and education
By Bhamy V Shenoy
Excerpts from the article:
After 45 years, I was returning to my native place Bantwal (near Mangalore) for a longer stay of two months. Ever since I left it for my studies at IIT and then abroad, I have visited it very frequently but only for one or two days. This is a typical rural town surrounded by small villages dependent upon farming and beedi rolling.
In this town there is a five year degree college with 1000 students. Most of them are first generation literates. A large percentage (99 per cent) is not accustomed to read books other than text books despite the college having a good selection of books. These students for several reasons are also not accustomed or allowed to ask questions as in many other colleges.
Because of the well critiqued education system of ours, they are also not encouraged to think and develop their own solutions to any problems. To make some changes in this kind of rigid and learning-unfriendly environment, I experimented with seminar series called “True education” during my stay. It was a great success.
An experiment
I had 19 sessions with a small group of 20 students. We limited the participation so that every one can be given personal attention. They regularly attended these sessions over a period of seven weeks. None of the topics will help the students to score more marks. There was no compulsion to attend.