Cultural confluence gives students a universal outlook

The last decade saw the mushrooming of new schools — small, large and medium — in India with the tag ‘international’ aimed at giving them a marketing edge over other schools in urban areas.

Those who supported them were non-resident Indians (NRIs) who returned home for good, progressive school boards and parents who were looking not so much for tradition in the teaching-learning methodology, but for a vision to match the needs of  future generations.

Sadly, most of these so-called ‘international’ schools offered nothing to meet the criteria implied by the epithet.  They had no enlightened leadership either in the management or teaching staff to embrace the changes that were required by the paradigm shift in education all over the world.  

In the last quarter century,  the focus of teaching has shifted from the subject to student.  The teacher metamorphosed from the sage to guide and fellow learner.  Learning moved away from being knowledge-and facts-centred to experiential and experimental. 

In short, the emphasis was on learning for understanding, analysis, application, evaluation, and creation.  Individuality and diversity are now encouraged rather than suppressed.

Intelligence is today seen as a multi-faceted phenomenon that is inherent in each student. It must be nurtured in an environment rich with stimuli and purpose.

With a gradual but steady movement of the industrial age into the knowledge age, it was evident to educators that today’s children (tomorrow’s adults) would need very different skills to meet the challenges of their world of work.

Globalisation, the technical revolution and the knowledge economy have created the need for a learning society that could cope with the information explosion that came in the wake of new technologies.

These requirements resulted in major changes in the educational focus in progressive school systems all over Europe and North America.  The guiding factors were:
>    A capacity for life-long learning
>    Fluency in the language of global information and interaction
>    International mindedness and global awareness
>     Building of soft skills for the citizens of tomorrow, which include problem solving, decision making, team building, conflict management and negotiation.

With the support of technology and scientific awareness of a child’s early readiness, the responsibility of learning shifted from teacher to the student.  Support from teachers, parents, and the community were indispensable but not paramount in terms of children learning through inquiry and discovery. 

This is in sharp contrast to ‘received wisdom’, which was passively ingested by the learner from textbook or teacher, and regurgitated in   the summative assessments (examinations), which branded learners as excellent or otherwise, purely on the basis of their gift for recall.

Questioning, reflection, debate, and intellectual dissent have replaced those systems in the international curricula. 

Assessments are now seen as opportunities to improve, to move to excellence, or to remediate.  They are far removed from the final, judgmental pronouncements on a child’s performance or potential.

Curriculum change has incorporated greater authenticity and meaning, more coherence and connectivity, more reflection, self-evaluation and meta-cognition. It recognises that collaborative learning and synergy bring more meaningful outcomes.

Assessment reforms have increased the capacity for continual improvement.  The curriculum is based on common cognitive understanding as also on common humanistic understanding.
Holistic education gets top billing in an international school. 

This is because a child is seen as having multiple intelligences, where some are dominant and others need to be worked at. 

Academic excellence is seen only as part of growth, but seldom compromised. Learning must extend to other areas such as kinesthetic, musical, naturalist, intra-personal, inter-personal, mathematical, logical, and linguistic. 

The development of these areas grows competencies in a child, which are vital for survival and success in the work life of an adult and his or her role in the society.

Diversity of cultures in students, teachers and curricular content is an essential part of ‘internationalising’ a school.  While all schools cannot provide a mixed population of representatives from various countries, multi-cultural awareness and thinking can co-exist with the need to awaken nationalistic sentiments. 

Study of various languages, celebration of festivals and projects based on other countries than our own can only enrich children and steer them away from educational isolationism, which is what our fervent nationalists suggest and endorse. 

Many Indians are and will be navigating international waters and must learn early to transcend boundaries of class, gender, and nation. 

Technology and its fillip to information are given great emphasis in an international school.  This is no gimmick to flaunt, but is seen as a necessary tool to keep abreast and provide for engagement and empowerment of students.  It does not make a school elitist, to have every child using a laptop. 

These are not necessities, but they certainly speed up the process of learning and its pursuant advantages.  There is no real battle between a well-stocked library and a 24-hour access to the Internet; it is only a case of viability of providing an advantage.

It is evident then that fancy infrastructure, while desirable, is not mandatory.  Internationalism is not the niche or elitist education as perceived by many. It does not mandate the affiliation to an international board, or a multinational component in its population.

It is where progressive teaching or learning flourishes in an environment that is open-minded and fosters collaboration.  The vital part of being international is to get the focus and priorities right.

It is the acceptance of new paradigms in education, to the exclusion of some time-honoured traditions. It is the vision of a school that is guided by the synonyms of internationalism, i.e. openness, progressiveness, redefinition of the learning process, and the provision of competencies to students to live a productive and effective life in this century.

(The author is an educationist and currently serves as an education consultant to three schools in Bangalore and as an adjunct teaching faculty at The Indus Training and Research Institute)