Education
Education has a higher purpose than just developing knowledge and skills – of enabling children for a purposeful and meaningful living – and that comes with an understanding of the self and the world around.
Our education system is a legacy of the First and the Second Industrial Revolutions when the purpose of education was to prepare skilled labour for the factory system. Though automation and technological advancement radically altered the way we work, play or communicate in the Third Industrial Revolution (1960- ), the purpose of education, unfortunately, has remained unchanged in our current system of teaching the young.
Evidence of dramatic changes is all around us already — artificial intelligence, quantum computing, self-driven cars, genetic engineering, sharing economy, 3D printing, to name just a few. In the near future, the all-encompassing technology- and innovation-driven Fourth Industrial Revolution (2010-) will transform current social, cultural and economic structures into a new world order.
“Experiential Learning”, as you may be aware, “is the process of learning by doing.” Herein, it has been found that “by engaging students in hands-on experiences and reflection, they are better able to connect theories and knowledge learned in the classroom to real-world situations.” To put it a little differently, Experiential Learning is the process of learning through experience, and it is more narrowly defined as “learning through reflection on doing”. Although hands-on learning can be said to be a form of experiential learning, but the fact is that it does not necessarily involve students reflecting on their knowledge. Again, Experiential Learning is also clearly distinct from rote or didactic learning, in which the learner plays a comparatively passive role. Furthermore, though it is related to other forms of active learning such as action learning, adventure learning, free-choice learning, cooperative learning, service-learning, and situated learning, but it is not synonymous with them in any way.
Often, Experiential Learning is used synonymously with the term “experiential education”. However, while experiential education is a broader philosophy of education, experiential learning concentrates more on the individual learning process. That being the case, compared to experiential education, experiential learning is focussed more on concrete issues related to the learner and the learning context.
Historically, the general concept of learning through experience is quite ancient. Reference to this concept can be cited from around 350 BC when Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics “for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them”. Nevertheless, as an articulated educational approach, experiential learning is of much more modern origin. Originating in the 1970s, it was David A. Kolb who helped develop the modern theory of experiential learning, drawing heavily on the work of John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, and Jean Piaget.
Understandably, Experiential Learning has significant teaching advantages. As Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline (1990), puts it, “teaching is of utmost importance to motivate people. Learning only has good effects when learners have the desire to absorb the knowledge. Therefore, experiential learning requires the showing of directions to learners.”
Experiential Learning necessitates a hands-on approach to learning in contrast to the stereotype image of just the teacher at the front of the room imparting and transferring his/her knowledge to students. This concept makes learning an experience that moves beyond the classroom and seeks to bring a more involved way of learning.
Being such an involved concept, very few schools today are able to offer this kind of learning environment to its students. And if you are looking for Experiential Learning Schools in Noida, the one school that you will find at the forefront is HXLS, Noida.
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https://noida.hxls.org/