Learning poverty

Put mildly, selecting your child’s school is an excruciating painful experience. Expectations are magnanimous; reality is horrendous. Only a few possibilities can spare you from this conundrum: you don’t have kids or they don’t go to school yet. Living abroad is also an option but only for a handful. Sadly, despite parents’ sheer hard work, their kids tend not to reap fruits they had initially expected. The question remains: What our schools’ years are lacking? More interesting why do all these subjects of work ethics, personal virtues fail to express themselves in our society?

Why is the country being relegated to worst rankings in corruption, rule of law, civic sense, road accidents, safety, physical and mental health? Why is novelty rare and polarisation in abundance? These are hard questions; but if we linger on to answer and address them, the future is going to be even harder for our generations who are unable to practise and project what is contained in their books. In 1956, Benjamin Bloom and his collaborators published a framework for categorising educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. It answers some of the above-mentioned questions and our turmoil. Familiarly known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teachings across the US and in other developed countries.

This framework revolves around six major categories, most of which are rare across the length and breadth of our educational system. What we focus at home is rote learning. Sadly, it is even celebrated as our exams are tailored to test this very ability. Premium schools in Pakistan even struggle to fully implement Bloom’s leaning pedagogies in their classrooms. The teachers are barely trained and the administration lacks the will.

Only those lucky ones who have educated parents or who can afford to have coaching classes are able to learn. For the rest, there is no option other than spend their precious life years at the first step in Bloom’s Taxonomy i.e. memorising the content. Children’s cognitive, affective and psychomotor abilities are hardly assessed and hence never polished in true spirit. Our current teaching methodologies cry for improvement. Applying Bloom’s Taxonomy in our teaching and assessment can help. Else the crisis will linger on. Bloom’s Taxonomy consists of six major categories starting from the knowledge (memory) of the child and progressing towards comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and finally leads to the evaluation. The categories after Knowledge (memory) are presented as “skills and abilities” with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting these skills and abilities into practice.

The stepwise increase in the expectations for the child to perform results in the child’s enhanced multi-dimensional abilities as the child progresses in his school years. Take an example, a rote learning system requires students to memorise a verse from the holy book; a system based on Bloom’s Taxonomy will ask about the implicit and explicit message in the verse and how this verse can be applied in our present time. Currently, our education system even on paper fails to address these categorical developments of our children. This has resulted in learning poverty, estimated at 79% by the World Bank report in 2020, where students are progressing classes year by year but are unable to develop. The higher education scenario is not much different. It’s time we stopped making a mockery of our kids’ time and education.