Jay Cross - India has to Democratize Learning Now

Informal Learning guru Jay Cross says, "India needs to train 500 million people in the next ten years. Some have proposed building thousands of new schools and colleges. Yet if the building program began in earnest tomorrow, there still wouldn’t be enough time to build the required classrooms — some six times what India has today.

What would those schools teach? The half-life of a professional skill is down to five years and is shrinking fast. It makes no sense to train people on skills that will become obsolete in short order. I’ll suggest that people need to learn meta-skills, such things as:

• learning how to learn
• critical thinking and conceptualization
• pattern recognition
• design thinking
• working with one another
• navigating complex environments
• software literacy

India has neither time nor resources to prepare teachers to transfer these skills to hundreds of millions of people. The answer? Flip Indian education. Delegate the delivery of content to electronic means, and focus teachers on coaching, leading discussions, helping people over hurdles, and relating lessons to real life. Also, teach students and workers to help teach themselves. The time is ripe for India to democratize education, to help students to think for themselves and realize their potential. "