Educating for life

Benjamin Bloom’s model (known as Bloom’s Taxonomy) is an ideal approach to the educational process.  It classifies educational learning objectives into three domains: cognitive, affective and psychomotor. 

While the cognitive domain is knowledge-based and deals with processes such as memorising, comprehending, applying, analysing, synthesising and evaluating, the affective domain deals with the child’s emotions and attitudes.  The psychomotor domain handles the practical side like making use of tools effectively.

The education process largely focuses on the cognitive domain and fills the students with theoretical knowledge.  Certain subjects like physics, chemistry and biology have practical classes which take care of the psychomotor domain to some extent, though in a very limited way. 

Acquisition of abstract knowledge for the sake of passing written examinations is almost the only purpose of education today.  Even that does not reach the higher levels proposed by Bloom.  A student should be able to make use of his knowledge in order to create something new, to “build abstract knowledge” of his own, at the highest level in the cognitive domain.  For example, learning a poem should lead to the composition of a new poem by the student.  Or a student should be able to take a mathematical theorem beyond comprehension to application: create a new theorem, for example, or apply the theorem to solving some new problem. 

The affective domain is ignored by and large in today’s educational system.  CBSE introduced something called Value Education in order to work on the affective domain.  But it has failed to achieve the purpose.  In fact, it has become just like the cognitive domain: a value based question is asked in the examination and that’s all.  There is no way of checking the values and principles, attitudes and outlooks of the student, let alone shaping them.  

If we can take care of the affective domain, our education system will become much more effective in creating better citizens. 

As Ivan Illich argued in his book, Deschooling Society, our education system creates psychological impotence.  Our schools create or seek to create professionals who will serve the existing socio-political system which revolves round wealth and little else.  You become a doctor or an engineer or anything else in order to earn a good income and attain a certain status in society, and not for serving the people with your skills.  Thus we have coaching centres in addition to schools for helping students gain admission to best institutions.  Or else parents can pay heavy capitation fees and buy admission in such institutions.  It’s mostly about buying the seat, buying the skills and then selling those skills.  This should change.  That calls for what Thomas Kuhn called ‘paradigm shift.’ 

Our educational system should change the focus from creating professionals to unfolding the unique individual in each student. 

PS. Written for IndiSpire Edition 202: #LearnNotEducate