Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

children’s ways of thinking with authoritatively sanctioned, scientifically validated
understandings. But such attempted displacement may have only limited impact
on deeply held beliefs or ideas that carry the weight of popular legitimacy.
Children learn to arrange the knowledge imparted at school separately from that
acquired from tradition or at home. Only pedagogic engagement with the latter
is liable to lead to the transformation of entrenched personal beliefs.
Is water an unlimited thing? At age 7 or 8, many children are likely to believe that water
is available for human enjoyment in unlimited quantities. For a child to learn about water
conservation as a condition for sustainable development, it is important for him or her
first to understand that water is measurable. This in turn depends on his or her internalisation
of the concept of measurability of length and width. Measurement of length and
area become a reality when they are routinely applied by children themselves to compare
and judge the relations between different objects. Acquiring such habits of measurement
prepares children to notice that water too has a quantity. Instructing them how to measure
it then becomes a worthwhile challenge for the teacher, paving the way for promoting
consideration of situations of scarcity. Other questions, such as ‘Where did the water
go?’, may become meaningful at this point, requiring observations of a different kind.
Knowledge of the sociology of childhood also helps in curriculum-related
deliberation, where psychological issues cannot be considered in isolation from
the social context. A sociological perspective involves taking account of the
role of home, neighbourhood, communal and other milieus in shaping students’
lived experience. The diversity of these contexts requires flexibility in curriculum
framing, something often overlooked in the highly centralised education systems
common across Asia. Much work in child psychology also emphasises the impact
of the social environment — economic, cultural and technological — on children’s
intellectual and emotional development (Bruner, 1962; Elkind, 1981). All of this
requires considerable skill and flexibility not just from curriculum developers, but
also from classroom teachers. A rigid curriculum policy that forces the teacher to
stick to a prescribed text is likely to discourage engagement with the knowledge,
experience and resources for learning that children bring with them to school.
No matter how syllabus-bound a system of education is, its efficiency will
significantly decline if it permits little space for the teachers to adjust their
pedagogical approach to their students’ lived experience. Promotion of greater
‘inclusion’ and ‘equity’, entailing the practice of non-discriminatory pedagogy,
requires sensitivity to the various dimensions of diversity and inequality within
society — regional, national and local. Schooling is likely to feel remote and
meaningless to many children if it does not engage with their experience of
‘reality’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). This is true for all school subjects, but
especially for the social sciences, which seek to impart the capacity to make
sense of the socially constructed world. Differences in milieus also exist within
the system of schooling itself, not only between elite private and regular staterun
schools, but typically also between rural and urban public schools. Even if the
same curriculum is followed across the system, the effectiveness with which it is
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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