As a wise man once said, “It is not what you do that matters, but how you do it.” Since the dawn of education, we have been told that we have to study from this syllabus. We have to learn from this book, why? Because some person in some part of the world said that this is what is best for you. Education has almost always been like this. For centuries, 100’s of students go to a huge building where they meet the people who teach them about some subject that might not help you in the real world and they become our teachers. They do teach us important things, but they also end up wasting our time sometimes. A football player doesn’t need to know how to solve a chemical reaction using Williamson’s synthesis. A chemist doesn’t have to know how to compute an integral using Matlab and neither does a singer need to understand the physics behind 2 atoms and how collisions work.
Education prioritizes the rote learning of facts and less practicality. Current education prioritizes marks over understanding. In a country like India, a parent would ask his/her child if they would score well in an exam rather than if they have understood the concept. It is all about theory and writing 100’s of words that may or may not change you. These words have to be the same from a textbook, and not from your mind. It is more about a word than an idea. Current education has been the same for so long. If current education was visualized against education a century ago, we would be shell-shocked at the similarities. It has not changed. It has continued to be about rote and memory.
Imagine what would happen if you force-feed a child a bitter candy, what would happen? Firstly, the child wouldn’t want to eat it, and secondly, it will also be bad for the child and affect the child.
This is the same concept of current education and must be fixed. This is where STEM education plays a major role. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. It is a novel method that could affect the mental understanding of education as a whole. STEM is a practical approach to education as it stops rote understanding and makes us ready for the new and improved world.
The exams in STEM are more practical. It makes us create rather than write. There isn’t one way, but 100 different ways that you can make something or solve a problem. This is the key idea behind STEM, it works on the principal basis that the world is no more about paper, the wheel, or the printing press. We are now about satellites, cars, and complex machines. You can’t create a machine with paper. But you can create a machine with your hands and tools. This is what STEM is all about. In school, we learn how to sort an array. In STEM, we learn how to make machines and use this knowledge, not just the theory behind it.
It is not the bitter candy of modern education. It is a vegetable that tastes like a great candy and the child also craves it. The child wants it, and so STEM has taken education to a level in which almost everyone wants it because they like it and they find it interesting and they have the wish to pursue it. It is no longer rote. It changed education from rote to practical. It has impacted education by adding practicality to this sort of theoretical education. Since the introduction of STEM, current education systems have tried to improve by adding practical concepts from as early as the 3rd grade.
This is the main feature of STEM that has changed the current system and has fundamentally changed the way we think about education.
WHIZROBO is a part of 10,000 Women Startup initiated by NSRCEL which is the start-up incubator of IIMB that is recognized by the Govt. of India. and was founded in the year 2000. Over 470+ and over 1260+ ventures have gone through the Incubation and Launchpad program respectively contributing to over 600 direct jobs.
