Even the 'best of schools' fail to ensure academic performance of all students

Further, careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) will remain the easiest gateway to professional success. No child should feel excluded from career opportunities in STEM due to poor academic performance at school.

The reality, on the other hand, is that the overwhelming majority of students face a ‘regressive shock’. Students helplessly live in an increasingly weaker connection to math and science teaching with every ‘promotion’ to the next class! Worse, tuition and coaching make matters perplexing and taxing, without recourse. To be fair, however, a very small minority among schools is sincerely striving to change this reality (with no known success, as yet).

We have already discussed the unfortunate reality that NO SCHOOL can GUARANTEE academic excellence for ALL students because the very design of school is defective. The teaching-learning resources and processes of schools are inherently ineffective and zillion 'improvisations' in the same will do no good. Of the several critical deficiencies in the teaching-learning processes and resources, the important three are:

A brief comparative of the tuition/coaching systems of the four countries is very illustrative and presented as under:

The educationally disadvantaged children must not be offered a watered down syllabi as they have to compete with the rest for all the times later; extensive supplementary support in the language of academics and comprehensive prior knowledge bridge is what such children need.

Very low expectations from students (and low expectations beget poor performance)100% attendance is perhaps the only expectation from students; leave applications attract the most shocking reactions from the schools. Their mere presence is good enough for attendance.

Being attentive in classroom is not binding on them. They can get the homework done by the tuition teachers, buy projects off-the-shelf, get essays from the net, not read ahead of the class, not study everyday, not think but 'parrot'’' answers, not volunteer to speak a sentence in class for 14 years.

The list of 'couldn't care less' things at schools' end is horrifyingly endless. No wonder that students become non-performers by Class X. Those who do 'perform' are despite the system.We need to challenge every student to do well.

Maths and science especially need practice and ‘challenge’ on a daily basis! And ideally, the challenge must be self-targeted by children and not in the form of ‘Olympiads’ or one-off assessments.

Parents treated as outliers and even worse - as the fall guy (blamed for their child’s poor performance)Schools have failed in harnessing the critically complementing role of parents in ensuring academic excellence of students.

Schools ‘officially’ take little cognizance of what children do at home and have long been accepting tutored homework, bought out projects, ‘googled’ book summaries, remote-tutored answers, etc. As expected, teaching at school is not appropriately reinforced by learning at home and over time the performance of students starts to fall off the (misplaced) expectations.

In fact, the only proven fact about school education is very uncharitable to schools - ‘parenting/immediate community matters for sure’. And schools fail to harness parental contribution.

The role of parents in maths and science education is important for another reason too – a vast majority of parents ‘fear maths and science’ and, expectedly, rather than going the extra mile for their children, they tend to run away from these two subjects to make matters worse.

Indeed, schools must go the extra mile in math and science education by educating at least one of the parents also in the two subjects (along with the students).

A tall order, but there is no getting away from it. Obviously, the maths and science education for parents cannot be organized the same way as for the students; innovative online learning resource with need-based, face to face support is the workable option.

Parents must shed their fears of maths and science and duly complement schools. Homes where parents have no fear of maths or science end up securing better performance for their children; the fear of maths and science is unduly exaggerated. There is literally little in math and science syllabi up to Class VIII that a child-centred mother cannot help her children with.

Mentoring Million Minds is the world’s only learning system to offer concept-based, specifically actionable, multi-class unique micro-progress reports to parents and students to support self-help. It empowers parents to get the most realistic picture of children’s academic progress. It helps bring parents and children closer and makes families happier together!

How parents can ensure a cyber-safe environment?

It makes better sense to discuss this question with parents. The discussion that follows could be shared with parents, without any need to edit.

Awareness and education can help considerably in preventing and dealing with the consequences of cyber-bullying. Here is a set of five cyber-values our children should be encultured with:

1. Accountability: children need to be taught to think before they act; we need to educate them about the possible consequences of being involved in cyber-bullying as victim or perpetrator.
2. Privacy: children need to be educated about the ways to be ‘private and conservative’ in their public life, especially in a global media, that is the Internet. They must be educated to keep their online information brief and their passwords well protected.
3. Blocking: children need to learn to say ‘NO’, censor communication and relationship when necessary; block all communications from cyber-bullies and not to respond to their apparent overtures.
4. Respect: teaching them to respect others and not to ignore the pain of others. If kids understand how much bullying hurts, fewer may cooperate with those bullying.
5. Trust: it is crucial that we teach them not to take matters into their own hands but trust adults instead. However, if adults expect to be trusted they need to make themselves worthy of that trust by ensuring all the time and attention needed to deal with any reported bullying (and discreetly keep track of the situation for a while).

Fortunately, there are quite a few tools to help prevent and control cyber-bullying by equipping students with the critical thinking and decision-making skills they need to be safe, responsible and technologically proficient cyber citizens.

However, we think that it is less a technology issue and more about creating a better society for children – loving homes, caring schools and sensitive communities (at multiple levels).

What role can parents play in countering cyber-bullying?

First and foremost, parents need to be the one ‘trusted source’ that children can go to when things go wrong online and offline. Yet, they often are the one source children avoid when things go wrong online. Most of the victims do not talk to parents about cyber-bullying as they fear uncomfortable parental responses and ostracisation from peers (because peers also do not really trust parents) and are apprehensive that parents may overreact (for the lack of time and attention) and make the situation worse.

Commonsense to cyber-sense

First, the good news - keeping your children safe online does not necessitate learning much about technology, it is about commonsense and communication. Parents need to take cues from what their parents had done about bullying when they were young and apply the lessons to cyber-bullying of their children.

Here is a set of actions parents need to educate their children about:

1. Do not talk to or accept anything from strangers. Online, everyone is a stranger unless assured otherwise, that is the rule.
2. Come straight home after school. Parents have always known that children can get into trouble when they wander around after school. Wandering aimlessly online is not any different.
3. Do not provoke fights. Trying to provoke someone in cyberspace is called “flaming” and it is just as avoidable as it is in the physical world.
4. Do not steal. While downloading music without paying for it, and copying a friend’s computer game or software may be common these days, it is wrong. It is very important that we teach our children how to behave well online also.
5. Do not tell people personal things about yourself. It is like writing your personal diary on a billboard. You never really know who you are talking to. And even if you think you know who you are talking to, there could be strangers lurking and reading your posts without letting you know that they are there. Educate your children to be very discreet on online profiles and public forums.
6. We need to get to know your friends. Get to know their online friends, just as you would get to know their friends in everyday life.

Do’s for Parents

1. Talk to children about cyber-bullying before it happens. Work out strategies to address any potential issues and reassure your children that you will be there to support them.
2. Advise your child not to reply to any messages from a bully. Often, if bullies do not receive a response, they give up.
3. Learn to block out a bully online, so that they are no longer able to make contact.
4. Report cyber abuse to appropriate authorities, online or offline. Cyber laws are getting stringent and tracking cyber-bullies is also getting easier.
5. Talk to your child’s school if cyber-bullying involves another student. The school should have a policy in place to help manage such issues.
6. If your child has been involved in cyber-bullying and seems distressed or shows changes in behaviour or mood, it may be advisable to seek professional support.
7. Stay involved in your child’s use of new technology. Set up your own account and learn about privacy settings to understand how to best protect your child. Ensure as much ‘public area’ (within home) access to computers and internet as possible and limit private access’ spaces and time.
8. Encourage children to think before they put anything online. Information posted online can be difficult or impossible to remove. An inappropriate image posted today can also have a long term impact on their reputation, across the globe.
9. If you find undesirable personal information appearing online, you can ask Google to disable the information. You could also reach out to the concerned website or online service provider and ask for it to be removed.

It may be stressed that shutting off the computer or turning off the mobile phone is not really the solution for escaping bullying. Connectivity is the life line for all of us and children too.

Source:
http://stopcyberbullying.org
http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/

Future of Economic Growth

The ultimate source of wealth

– Dykes Charles, Foundation for Economic Education www.fee.org (August 1, 1985)

What, then is ‘wealth’? For the economist, wealth is anything having economic value measurable in price. For most people, wealth means great amounts of worldly possessions. For nearly everyone, wealth is synonymous with money.

From the perspective of history, however, it is instructive to note that money has not always been the chief symbol of wealth as it is today. The concept of wealth has varied in different periods of history. For example, wealth in the medieval era was not thought of primarily as the possession of large amounts of money or material possessions, but in having power over other people. Still later, wealth came to mean the ownership of large tracts of land and great houses.

The Industrial Revolution again transformed the idea of wealth. Wealth no longer was viewed primarily as the possession of landed property, but the ownership of the means of production, e.g., factories, looms, mines, railroads. Then insidiously, over the last 150 years, the idea of wealth has changed from the ownership of the means of production to the possession of money.

George Gilder makes clear his conviction that wealth is basically a product of the human spirit and not of natural resources. He argues, moreover, that ‘riches’— money — is not the same thing as wealth. “Wealth consists,” he writes with reference to Saudi Arabia, “in assets that promise a future stream of income.

The flows of oil money do not become an enduring asset of the nation until they can be converted into a stock of remunerative capital—industries, ports, roads, schools, and working skills—that offer a future flow of support when the oil runs out.” In the 16th century, Spain became ‘rich’ much like Saudi Arabia, flooded by money in the form of silver from the mines of its colonies in Latin America. “But Spain failed to achieve wealth, and soon fell back into its previous doldrums, while industry triumphed in apparently poorer parts of Europe.”

Human capital includes things like character, knowledge, skills, creativity, health, imagination and liberty. Michael Novak, an American philosopher and diplomat rightly protests that when the classical economists discussed “the components of economic wealth—land, rents, capital, and labour—they nearly always overlook the most important ingredient: practical intelligence and the organisation of personal life.”

“The cause of wealth,” Novak believes, “lies more in the human spirit than in matter.” While productive or physical capital increases the productive capacity of a people by putting the tools or resources with which to work in their hands, human capital makes possible more efficient tools, or superior resources, and organises more effective means of utilising both physical and human capital to achieve desired ends.

Reproduced by permission of Foundation for Economic Education Charles Dykes, copyright (c) 1985, Foundation for Economic Education, The Ultimate Source of Wealth

New sources of growth: intangible assets

– OECD Report (September 2011)

In many OECD countries, investment in intangible assets is growing rapidly. In some cases, this investment matches or exceeds investment in traditional capital such as machinery, equipment and buildings. Intensified global competition, premium on innovation, ICTs, new business models, and the growing importance of the services sector have all amplified the importance of intangible assets to firms, industries and national economies.

The global economic crisis has placed a new focus on how policies might help the accumulation of intangible assets and provide new sources of growth. Concerns also exist that the crisis might undermine the financing of investment in intangible assets.

And in many emerging economies policymakers are seeking to develop the intangible assets necessary for success in high value-added activities. Evidence from a number of countries suggests faster growth in investment in intangible assets than in tangibles. The World Bank estimates that, for countries, the preponderant form of wealth worldwide is intangible capital.

Book Excerpt from “Physics of the Future” by Machio Kaku What is replacing commodity capitalism is intellectual capitalism. Intellectual capital involves precisely what robots and AI cannot yet provide - implicit pattern recognition and common sense.

Why is this historic transformation rocking the foundation of capitalism? Quite simply, the human brain cannot be mass produced. While hardware can be mass produced and sold by the ton, the human brain cannot, meaning that the common sense will be the currency of the future. Unlike with commodities, to create intellectual capital, you have to nurture, cultivate and educate a human being, which takes decades of individual effort.

As Thurow says, “With everything else dropping out of competitive equations, knowledge has become the only source of long run sustainable competitive advantage”

Our perspective

The past century saw natural resources led economic growth in many countries, but at the same time, we have witnessed exceptional growth in Japan, South Korea and Singapore primarily driven by human capital. The journey of high economic growth rates will continue to roll on and knowledge-led revolution will reach more and more societies. The potential for change ahead is immense, for instance, the way the cost of solar energy production is coming down, an unprecedented socio-economic development awaits the developing world because ‘everywhere energy’ will drive revolution in water availability, food production, education, health and micro-enterprise.

According to a World Bank report, the preponderant form of wealth worldwide is intangible capital—human capital and the quality of formal and informal institutions in the country that nurture and shape the productivity of human capital. Rich countries are largely rich because of the skills of their populations and the quality of the institutions supporting the social and economic lives. Intangible capital also includes social capital, that is, the trust among people in a society and also trust in public institutions like an efficient judicial system and government and clear property rights.

Natural resources and physical asset led growth has been relegated to the bottom of the pyramid of wealth accumulation in nations and companies alike. The top space is occupied by intangible assets like intellectual property rights, patents, design, copyright, brand value and goodwill. For illustration, the brand value of Google and Coca Cola stands at $107 billion and $81.5 billion while their annual revenues are $66 billion and $46 billion . The value of some leading global companies, such as Microsoft, is now almost entirely accounted for by their intangible assets. In recent years, we have witnessed the valuations of patents held by fledgling companies like Blackberry, Motorola mobility (and bankrupt) Kodak at $4.5 billion, $4 billion and $500 million.

Qualcomm is the world’s largest mobile phone chip maker. Qualcomm benefits from the sale of handsets even when they don’t use its chips. The company’s ownership of CDMA technology, allows it to charge royalties on most phones connected to modern data networks. Its revenues are over $26 billion and licensing provides the company with the majority of its profit.

The wealth from intangible assets are not limited to corporates alone as examples abound of individual patent holders turning millionaires after licensing their research and development. Apart from scientists and researchers, artists are also never out of news for their million dollar book, movie or music deal. The nature of wealth is morphing - it is increasingly intangible assets, which will ensure future wealth even after death as artist John Lennon has lapped up 200 million pounds through continuous sales of Beatles songs and Einstein raked in over $ 75 million by gracing his name for scientific tools, tablet computers, pens and a line of healthy food.

The emergence of intangible assets as the centrepiece of all economic, social and national wealth can be easily explained as ‘Knowledge’ - the core of the present emerging economy is also an intangible asset.

Gazing through the crystal ball

1. 3Rs (Reading, Writing, Arithmetic) were never more important. Command over the language of academics and business is a critical must! Language and math (the most universal language) competence must be well-achieved for all students in school years. Parents must remain very vigilant and proactively involved in ensuring excellence in English and math education of their children.
2. There is tremendous opportunity to blend local, cultural, and historical knowledge with modern and scientific knowledge to develop more effective solution for communities across the world. The world was never more democratically poised for globally agile micro enterprises focussed on the local. Solve the ‘problems’ of your local community or any other known community as the focus of your business; real world solutions out of virtual world backbone.
3. Entrepreneurship will be commonplace and the penetration of digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be high in all socio economic endeavours. All economic activities will have large dose of state of art technology; playing with the technologies of the time was never more important.

Future of Careers

The on demand economy

In 1998, HBR published an article titled “Dawn of the E-lance economy” by Thomas W. Malone and Robert J. Laubacher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The authors look at how a new kind of organisation could form the basis of a new kind of economy - an e-lance economy - where all the old rules of business are overturned and big companies are rendered obsolete. They postulate a world in which business is not controlled through a stable chain of management in a large, permanent company. Rather, it is carried out autonomously by independent contractors connected through personal computers and electronic networks.

The next year, Elance, an online staffing company initially developed as a technology for supporting virtual work was launched. 17 years later, after merger with another online staffing platform, it created a resource that consists of 9 million freelancers and 4 million businesses. The Economist predicts that freelance workers available at a moment’s notice will reshape the nature of companies and the structure of careers.

Today, a growing group of entrepreneurs are bringing together computer power with freelance workers to provide on demand services at the click or a swipe. Uber provides chauffeurs, Handy supplies cleaners. SpoonRocket delivers restaurant meals to your door, Instacart keeps your fridge stocked, Medicast will arrange for you a doctor.

InnoCentive will help you fix research and development problems in engineering, computer science and business while Axiom and Eden McCallum will provide you services of lawyers and consultants respectively.

The founders of these companies tapping freelance labour describe their workers as micro-entrepreneurs at the vanguard of a new, flexible future of work in which people only do the jobs they like, but also when they like. The on-demand economy allows society to tap into its under-used resources: thus Uber gets people to rent their own cars, and InnoCentive lets them rent their spare brain capacity.

Our perspective

The definition of a good job as equivalent to being an employee of a large company is the legacy of the 20th century. Globalisation and IT have enabled the emergence of on-demand economy with more rootless and flexible labour force and this may be the dominant work model in the times to come. There will be no employee-employer relationship but a service contract between the two parties for a particular work. As we write this book, one third of the US workforce already consists of independent contractors and freelancers.

The workers in the near future will not be looking for job security, benefits and steady wage rises but would choose chasing their dreams over buying a house. They, like the present workforce, will be eager to learn, work with great companies and teams, and help great leaders to succeed but for them, work is not a cosy place to spend time until they get old but a list of experiences and tasks they want to complete on the journey to their own next big thing.

The workforce of tomorrow will chose journeys over careers. They will work only on projects that are meaningful to them and work for them will be a list of completed tasks and not the time spent at office. Individuals will take on more responsibility for their own personal development and focus on constantly improving their specific skill sets to excel in competitive environments with other solopreneurs around the world. With the globalisation of the skills and increasing ease of travel, more people will be working internationally combining their dreams of traveling with a fulfilling career.

Gazing through the crystal ball

1. The formal education system does not equip a vast majority of students to secure meaningful careers. The best way to get ready for a great career is to learn on the job, i.e., apprenticeships. Become an apprentice at the best company/organisation and continue till you significantly know the domain. Thereafter, pick up a job or kick-start entrepreneurship.
2. Life and career goals must be achieved together and the ideal career should support life goals (e.g., travel, time with family, community participation, etc.) First, be clear about the life you want, then tailor a career that fits the bill.
3. Develop 360 degree view of the chosen career by multidisciplinary skill development for self.
4. Develop ‘T’ shaped expertise – deep in one domain but good in a wide range of domains

The practical benefits of the childhood stage of human growth

It is pertinent here to digress a little to register the evolutionary root of the childhood stage and get a sense of the immensely organic linkage of the evolutionary path of humans and the (unique and long) childhood among humans. The level of complexity of the brain is such that it cannot take place in the womb and must occur outside of it because the size of the head at the time of birth is limited by the bipedal (walking on two legs) nature of humans; needless to stress that bipedalism is a very unique evolutionary advantage for us (over other animals and nature).

Interestingly, the childhood stage has several practical benefits to parents as well as children. Let us look at the benefits for both parents and children.

Benefits for parents

Surprisingly, the childhood stage significantly reduces the demands on parents in raising children and derives the pride and pleasure of adding their 'unique social imprint' to the (already inherited) biological imprint in their children. Five key benefits enjoyed by parents due to the childhood stage are:

1. Enculture children to the larger society

The childhood-centred pattern of human growth creates the opportunity of nurturance in older and other members of family and kinship. It is central to social and cultural education; hildren may also feel uniquely bonded to their families and caretakers and a personalized two-way bond of affection is formed for life between the children and the non-parent care givers.

This is accomplished by living in extended family groups—two or three brothers and sisters, their spouses, children and parents— and sharing child care.

It is in this light that we can better understand the reasons of creating the multi-layered social organization of humans.

2. Lower the 'cost and risk' of raising children

Despite being in significant growth phase, children require lesser amount of food compared to adults (but calorific value and protein needs are no less). A 5-year-old child of averagesize, for example, requires nearly 25% less dietary energy per day for maintenance and growth than a 10-year-old juvenile. The brain and body growth do not overlap and that relaxes thedemands on parents in terms of food for children in this stage.

Childhood stage also reduces the risk of survival and growth due to the ill-effects of factors such as diseases, lack of adequate quantity of food, brief bouts of poor socialisation etc. because the brain is plastic and constantly reconfiguring itself in this phase of growth. For instance, very broadly, the ill-effects of malnutrition have a higher chance of reversal among children compared to among adults.

3. Better quality of social, personal and professional life

The longer period of growth takes the pressure off time and money investments on the development of children. Parents can better plan birth of children to best suit their personal andprofessional exigencies. Mention may also be made of the longer period of joy of parents – childhood phase is the best period for parenting; everything about children is sheer joy and adorable – behaviour, looks, 'size', curiosity, playfulness and such others.

4. Custom adaptation

Human children are well adapted to their environment – social, physical and cultural - due to the longer period of childhood after infancy.

This is a significant advantage in the sense that humans have been able to raise a greater percentage of offspring to adulthood than any other species even in harsh conditions (a benefit of better adapted children).

5. Reproductive agility

A childhood stage may have originally evolved as a means by which the mother, the father and other kin could provision dependent offspring with food and reduce the period of infancy stage of mother-centric attention. After weaning the infant, the mother is freed from demands of nursing, and starts ovulating (release of egg by the ovary which is inhibited due to nursing). This decreases the inter-birth interval and increases reproductive fitness.

Incidentally, the infancy (high dependency) period for each of the ape species is longer than that for humans and mothers among apes remain reproductively constrained.

Benefits for children

To be brief, the long childhood stage among humans is a prerequisite because it may be nearly impossible to organically develop the human brain in a shorter time scale. What is the evidence that suggests the impossibility of a faster brain development? For instance, human newborns use 87% of their resting metabolic rate for brain growth and functioning (and only the minuscule rest is used for other biological processes and development), a figure that declines to 44% by age 5 and 25% in adulthood; survival will be at stake if brain demands more from the metabolic activities during childhood.

Indeed, there are several advantages for children due to the childhood stage and some are listed here under:

• There is a socio-economic world to be initiated into, as crafted by humans over the evolutionary path, and childhood is the reason for the possibility of slow and steady pace of initiation.
• Children can easily learn and be ready to internalise any language, culture, religion, social mores and practices they are exposed to - the long childhood makes it far easier
• The tentativeness and exploratory behaviours of children is a critical factor in the individualistic development of every human child - the most powerful driver of evolution of humans. Indeed, child is the father of man and childhood is the driver of change and growth.
• Childhood is also an amazing period of informal learning on way to enter the formal learning system; the formal education system transformed the pace and reach of development across the globe and childhood is a critical component of the education system.
• Interestingly, play in childhood is the world's best laboratory for 'simplified simulation of the complex situations and realities' of adult life; play and childhood are two sides of the same coin and make childhood an extremely powerful learning phase of the stages in human development.

A word of caution - adults should not try to extend childhood of their children by continuing to treat their juvenile or adolescent children as though they were still in the childhood phase. Obviously, the other side is equally true - we should not rush children out of childhood.

What’s wrong with coaching and tuition?

It makes better sense to discuss this question with parents. The discussion that follows could be shared with parents, without any need to edit.

All new-born children do get weaned off mother’s milk sooner than later but a tuitioned-child may never get off the dependence on tuition. Indeed, children should not be expected to become independent learners with the help of tuition or coaching. Tuition as we see in India – a replay of the teacher in school – is an Indian invention, reflecting the near collapse of classroom teaching. The world uses supplementary education in the form of tutors who help children in resolving specific areas of difficulties or conceptual blind spots but they never replay the teacher.

To be honest, in some ways tuition and coaching are almost an exclusively Asian practice; Korean, Chinese and Japanese children also heavily resort to tuition. However, the comparison between India and these countries with respect to tuition ends there. The reasons, form and content of tuition in India are very different compared to the other three countries.

A brief comparative of the tuition/coaching systems of the four countries is very illustrative and presented as under:

It must be obvious that tuition and coaching in India are an altogether different kettle of fish and arising out of poor quality formal education.

Further, tuition/coaching suffer from the same problems that the school classrooms do — broadcast of content, little time for discussion, class of 25 – 50 students (can go up to 500 students), a reporting system that is akin to school’s progress reporting (gross, inactionable and non-cumulative), no time for remedial measures, ‘faceless students’, etc.

It may be obvious by now that seeking tuition for your child is one major reason why your child may still be struggling.

Please stop tuition and coaching for your children and get them tutors who only work on the weaknesses or the strengths of your children and never more than once a week in a subject. Tuition for completing homework is to be totally avoided.

In fact, tuition and coaching are robbing children of the need (and skills) to think, synthesise and ‘make connections’ within and across subjects.

The last word — none of us (parents) took tuitions and yet we HAVE done well! Your child will also do well – get him off tuition and work on improving reading skills, language and previous-class concepts!

The 2013 annual education research by Pratham found that the impact of tuition in rural areas is reflected as a mere 10% increment in the performance of private school students. In government schools, the performance enhancement by tuitions is nearly 15%. Apparently, the quality of government schools is so poor that re-teaching is essential.

It’s unnatural for children to be ‘weak’ in Math!

Math as a domain/subject has quite a few totally unique distinctions. The five more pertinent ones are:

• Math is THE language of (all) Gods ‘God’s creation’ – nature – is totally mathematically managed/minded; the natural world is an amazing ‘multi-level system’ in cause and effect, all over its expanse.
• Math is also the only universal language There are thousands of mother-tongues but only one way to write things mathematically, across the world, without exception.One can shop, pay and receive money anywhere in the world; square as a geometrical figure has the same attributes.
• Human child is born out of amazing mathematical plays Human children cannot be an exception (i.e. cannot be weak in math), unless ‘genetically (or socially) crafted’ by humans themselves to be weak in math.Considering girls to be weak in math is just one living example of social disability, there is no genetic basis to it.
• ‘All subjects’ are mathematically transacted at research levels It’s impossible to concieve higher-level physics, chemistry, sociology, design, architecture etc. without expressing them mathematically.
• Math has ‘aweful’ halo It’s the only subject in which there is no individual pride/civility lost, in any community/country, in the statement ‘I hate math’.

Yet, no country or community, as a whole, has ever even imagined downplaying math.

Expectedly, math education is not short on research/experiment to improve it. Unfortunately, the secular trend in learning levels in math indicates southward slide. Happily, however, we only seem to have missed out some critical insights and we can readily put down the monstrous side of math education.

The following are the five insights not yet integrated into math education:

• Significant conceptual gaps afflict teachers; the problem is particular serious in the foundational primary school. To be clear, it’s really no fault of the math teachers themselves, it’s simply a reflection of their own poor quality math education.But we’ve wished away this aspect of teacher quality (there are more dimensions of teacher quality) because we won’t know where to start solving it.
• Almost complete disconnect of math with daily life activities/issues; math only exists in copies, math education is build on very abstract foundations and remains such through K-12 education. Naturally, there is of no use/interest to most children for math.We’ve had half-hearted attempts to address this issue, e.g., math labs in many schools. But ‘lab’ and life are not the same things – lab experiments/activities are what they are – half real; labs are best useful for measurement not experience, e.g., if we see friction in lab and not in real life, we won’t really get friction ever
• There is little ‘student-centered’ or ‘learning oriented’ educational material in math; students can’t help themselves – math is introduced in purely mathematical language and simply as a set of procedures/methods.We’ve totally ignored children’s need to have self-help educational materials in math; and math should as many ‘daily-life’ stories as other subjects and it must be ‘readable in volumes’ like other subjects. Math must also be ‘read, seen, conversed, and experienced’ and in a language that students have better command over (till class VIII at the least).
• Concept-based education system is still up in the air; it’s not even easy to define the term concept. However, math education needs concept-based teaching, learning, assessment, performance reporting, remedial, cumulative development tracking etc. far more than any other subject.Expect dramatic improvement in student leaning with truly concept-based math education. We need to comprehensively make new sets of books, assessments, activities, reporting system and remedial inputs for math.
• Math is a language and math education should offer multi-grade study flexibility to students, to reflect the reality of languages – no student is at the same level in a class; math must be taught with a curriculum that is domain-oriented (e.g., number system, algebra, geometry) and not class-oriented (with strict syllabi boundaries). We need a new syllabi for math – domain-wise books rather than class-wise books. Indeed, ‘weaker’ children are minted in schools – they are creation of ‘class-wise syllabus and assessment requirements’. Technology can deliver the necessary class-free teaching, learning and assessment in math.