My son recently got a document from his school that lists the subjects he has to choose from for his GCSE exams. We were discussing his options and I asked him what are his parameters for choosing a subject? Right off the bat he said, “My interest in the subject and how good I am in it.”I agreed but suggested that he also consider a third parameter to guide his subject selection decision. This third…

“Who won World War II?  i. Goodies  ii. Baddies”  Taken from a cartoon, this line nicely sums up how multiple-choice questions in standardised examinations are dumbing down education. We have become besotted with how students perform in examinations. Such exam-centric education unduly emphasises learning the content of a discipline, usually by rote, and students often lack a deeper understanding of fundamental concepts or episteme of a discipline and the underlying thinking framework. In the 20th century stockpiling…

In Dec 2015 I was back again in the Himalayas to conduct Timeless Lifeskills workshops in small, rural schools. The theme of the workshops this visit was ‘Tinkering with Electronics & Circuits – Thinking Like a Scientist’.The underlying objective of the workshop was to make students aware of how experts in different disciplines think. In other words focus of the workshops was on 'Modes of Thinking'. Figuring out how a scientist thinks (observation > hypothesis > experiments >…