COL – Elementary

Elementary education is such a ground up learning opportunity, have we got this right to begin with? Till to-date all types of efforts that have gone into making this first step as the most important step is certainly laudable. Is there something that we can do about it to take this one step ahead of everything else we have done so far? Yes. Don’t be surprised if I say we have not yet explored the powers and possibilities of COL.

Everything we do nowadays needs to be more than just a qualitative analysis. We need a solid irrefutable quantitative analysis to show the world that what is being done is producing results beyond expectations. At certain times, this is good and we need it. Other times, it is a bad – very bad as this analysis skims around the frivolous.

One such thing is some videos on YouTube going viral. Most often than not, you would see million other YouTube videos posted on similar lines – hoping to get a similar attention. Believe me. There is nothing wrong in doing this – if you do have the talent. However, the talent can only be defined qualitatively to begin with, right? Only quantitative proof of the same is the number of hits. However, these hits are so much skewed by the means with which they are captured, it is sometimes a joke.

So how do we measure talent? It is definitely a skill that has reached a level of recognition due to some strong and supporting attributes of an individual acting as a catalyst to help the individual to get noticed. We do have many shows to make that happen. However, when you see some entrants on a show like ‘American Idol’  (singing contest in US) you feel such skills are overrated by hype or by its pure entertainment value than the singing skill. Many a times, we as a family had felt such idiotic showmanship is a huge waste of our time. May be that it is beneficial for the production of such shows to show the contrast in singing to make others look better – but still it is pure waste of time when it comes to developing the learning skills.

Is it still possible to retain the entertainment value and provide a platform to display such skills? Certainly, yes. The coaches who work behind the scene to make it happen are often ignored or just mentioned as credits. I learnt by ABCD of reading and writing from a blackboard. Even then, I could not match the writing skills of my dad who could produce texts of font size 2 that is as legible as the font size 16. Is that a skill that is needed now? No. Is the effort that went into getting that skill perfected still needed now? Certainly, yes.

That, my friends, is COL. The learning skills focused on the end result is not what that matters, it is the effort that matters. This brings be to the extension of COL to COE – Circle of Effort.

The four circles that I have shared with you to-date become the alphabets of learning. It is as elementary as that, my dear Dr. Watson. With that, I will introduce you to Sherlock Holmes of learning in my next blogs.