Education is vital for every human being and it should be! Traditional Education has indeed failed to nurture talents, leaving the best brains in the last bench every time. This is indeed a serious issue, that should be taken care of and put it into immediate attention to the public. I saw this in the early days of my teenage. A lot of my friends were having trouble with math first, because they had all of these rank gaps accumulated in their learning. And because of that, at some point they got to an algebra class and they might have been a little bit shaky on some of the pre-algebra, and because of that, they thought they didn’t have the math gene, which was NOT TRUE ! People were struggling at their fundamentals while being pushed to subsequent levels/classes with their fragile foundation.
This is not the way, a learning methodology should be implemented. In a traditional academic model, we group students together, usually by age, and around middle school, by age and perceived ability, and we shepherd them all together at the same pace. Students run a race during their study, while missing all those intermediate mastery awards which will give them the enough stamina to finish their track. Every student/pupil is different in his own ways. He has his own timeline, capacity and thoughts to do things. This is even applicable to MACHINES! Machines now learn through sufficient training given by their masters. They attain a level of model saturation/stability (TO BE ELEGANT ENOUGH 🙂 ), before they move on to the real world. If this is the case with artificial bots, how much more students should be given structured and personalized learning, providing them the freedom to explore.
So the idea of mastery learning is to do the exact opposite. Instead of artificially constraining, fixing when and how long you work on something, pretty much ensuring that variable outcome, the A, B, C, D, F — do it the other way around. What’s variable is when and how long a student actually has to work on something, and what’s fixed is that they actually master the material. Now, a lot of skeptics might say, well, hey, this is all great, philosophically, this whole idea of mastery-based learning and its connection to mindset, students taking agency over their learning. It makes a lot of sense, but it seems impractical. This is no longer impractical with today’s technology. We have streaming/on-demand videos at our needs, friends around the globe who can help us with any concepts and technology allows us to literally roll back to any part of time to explore the content present. They need practice? They need feedback? There’s adaptive exercises readily available for students. For people still doubting on how this works, there are success stories readily available. Students who are home-schooled, left at their own pace of learning have excelled far ahead of others in terms of intellectual understanding and capacity.
Here comes a story. Meet 17 year old Malvika Joshi, who did not have any formal education but has made it to the prestigious MIT, thanks to her Mom for keeping her aside of the traditional education system. In Malvika’s words, she says “When I started unschooling, that was 4 years back, I explored many different subjects. Programming was one of them. I found programming interesting and I used to give more time to it than to other subjects, so, I started liking it at that time” .
Home-schooling is now trending than anytime before! I really think that this is all based on the idea that if we let people tap into their potential by mastering concepts, by being able to exercise agency over their learning, that they can get there. And when you think of it as just a citizen of the world, it’s pretty exciting. I also think it’s going to be a pretty exciting period to be alive ! Let’s hope for the best 🙂
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