জ্বলদর্চি

AN INQUISITIVE MIND ACCELERATES SCIENCE LEARNING /PRASUN KANJILAL

AN INQUISITIVE MIND ACCELERATES SCIENCE LEARNING 


PRASUN  KANJILAL 


At the beginning of the twenty first century civilization was at a crisis. If one looks around the world one will be reminded of the poem by W.B. Yeats "Things fall apart the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". There is an unprecedented destruction of Earth's environment: deforestation, soil erosion, climatic changes, ozone depletion, Tsunami calamity, desertification, species extinction etc. There is a tremendous political and social strive all over the world  including regionalism, ethnicism, religious fundamentalism, terrorism, kidnapping etc. If our children have to tackle this difficult world, then they should be confronted up during growing period.The  teachers of new era should be committed to a new approach, so that they can prepare their children to face these adverse situations . 

There is an accusing finger pointed at the education system in India that it is outmoded. It is said that the  present system of rote and examination oriented learning are bringing a devastating distortion in the personality of a child. In India children do not enjoy childhood. Those who can afford to go to school from very early childhood are overloaded with school bags and re-forced to experience rote learning. They have little time to play, explore, observe and enjoy. If the objective of education is to develop  the sense of wonder and curiosity in the child, power of observation, problem-posing and problem-solving skills and development of conceptual understanding then the present method of education in Indian schools develop very little of these skills or perhaps develop none. Children are fed with facts and more facts as they grow up but do not develop the skills to analyse, discern the essence of the problem and increase the cognitive and conceptual level. Though these aspects of learning process are true for any subject taught in a school but it is perhaps more true in the case of Science education. It is said that 'Science is doing' but 'doing Science' has been vanished from most of the schools in India. It is surprising to note that even in the middle ages of experimentation was given a very important place in the learning process. In a thirteenth-fourteenth century chemical treatise called 'Rasendra Chintamani', the writer Ramchandra said that "Those are to be regarded as real teachers who can verify by experiments what they teach and those are to be regarded as loadable disciples who can perform what they have learned from teachers as pupils, other than those are mere actors on the stage."

    There is an ancient Chinese proverb of wisdom that says "I read I forget, I see I remember, I do I understand". This is perhaps the crystallized essence of learning process. The teacher must have to be first enlightened with the enthusiasm to create and accelerate want among the children for knowledge and a good teacher is a conscious teacher with robust enthusiasm. 

জ্বলদর্চি হোয়াটসঅ্যাপ গ্রুপে যুক্ত হোন। 👇


In the education system today emphasis is given more on teaching than on learning. Though tremendous researches have been made as to the process of cognitive development of a child, very little is applied in our education system. It is necessary to develop our educational package more on the basis of how a child learns than on how a teacher wants to teach. There are definite stages in the cognitive development of a child which are genetically determined. The ideal condition will be when each child in a class room is given the experience of doing  experimental activities and thereby discover the process of nature and science himself. But this is not substitute of children doing the activity themselves. There is no comparison to joy and exhilaration when a child explores something by himself. 

👆Objectives of science learning :------

(a) To develop inquisitiveness and power of observation. 

(b) To record, organize and classify data and information in tables, Histograms, 
Bar-diagram and graphs. 

(c) To discover patterns, orders and sets in such observation and processes. 

(d) To generate further information by experiments and activities. 

(e) To analyse the available data so as to reach logically consistent and empirically valid conclusions called hypothesis. 

(f) To abstract such conclusions in order to conceive 'theories' and 'models' so as to be able to predict phenomenon. 
To achieve the above objectives children have to do things by themselves. The basis of doing things is experimentation and activities. 


The following are important in Indian situation: ---

(a) Environment around us should be used as far as possible to learn science. 

(b) Material used should be simple, cheap and should be locally available. 

(c) Classroom can be utilize for science learning if separate laboratory is not available. 

(d) Common school system is the only alternative.

(e) The whole syllabus of science & environmental science have to be  learnt through experiments and activities as far as possible within and outside of the class room with the help of different project.

Conclusion: ---

Science and technology plays a very important role in mankind  today. There is a great alignation between common man and Science. Science has become more like a juke box which common man cannot comprehend or understand. Yet, science developed in society through the ages to unvail the mysteries of nature and nature's process. The sense of wonder and quest is the source of all arts, sciences. A teacher's role is to create this sense of wonder and thirst for acquiring knowledge and exploring cause and effect relation behind the facts in a child. There should be a constant endeavour in a teacher to ignite the imagination of a child. 

Curiosity is the major driving force for all science learners. People think that- to be a good scientist one has to be highly intelligent. Well, one certainly has to be a little bit intelligent but what we really need is to be highly interested and  curious unless we really want to know the answer, we will never be able to contribute to new scientific discoveries.

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