Dear Friends,
We are discussing the Mobile School Project in detail. There are 22.8 million out-of-school children in Pakistan. More than that, adult women and farmers are illiterate and underprivileged. And when we consider students in schools, the majority is not significantly different or better particularly in STEM subjects. Memorization of facts, figures, names, dates, places, etc takes maximum time which promotes only to rote memory and cramming. Everyone is capable of learning and teaching but not all people have the same memory. Two major reasons behind higher drop out rates are; one weak memory which leads to punishment and embarrassment, and second students who need to earn to support their families; they have not enough time to attend the 06 hours schools. We think that there are two basic subjects; literacy and numeracy. Literacy means someone knows any language that how to read, write, speak, and listen; no matter that language is Englis, Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi, or any other. It is a settled principle around the globe that pupils can learn faster and easier in their mother tongue and English is a universal language of knowledge. So, it is better to use the mother tongue as an instructional medium, and then English language acquisition is essential to compete with the contemporary world. Numeracy means mathematics and calculus which is the foundation of questioning and reasoning, it helps us in critical thinking, problem-solving, and resource optimization. We can say, there is no magic or miracle but the mathematics behind everything, it is a language of nature, logic, truth, and right. If any student knows how to read, write, speak and listen to any language with conceptual learning of numeracy, he will become a positive and productive participant of any society to claim all his rights with responsibilities. This 02-subject education will raise motivation, common sense, a sense of respect, and a sense of responsibility. It will be a significant step towards socio-economic equality and equity. We are just considering basics and then English language acquisition so any student can take any free Massive Open and Online Courses from the world-renowned academic institutes to learn, grow and excel without any discrimination, barrier, certificate, diploma, or degree.
According to Professor E. D. Hirsch (Core Knowledge Foundation); all pre-school, kindergarten, primary, secondary and higher school curriculum can be taught within a few hundred hours. Knowledge-based mobile schooling opens doors to enabling playful and interactive learning in a practical environment, which in turn opens doors to productive and responsible citizenship. We endeavor to:
- Create literate citizens able to contribute to a democratic society.
- Empower each child to achieve his or her greatest academic potential.
- Shrink the excellence gap between the academic achievement of out-of-school children and that of their peers from high-performing countries.
- Shrink the fairness gap between the academic achievement of out-of-school children living in poverty and that of their economically advantaged peers.
Different points to develop the two-subject curriculum:
- Start from basic numeracy like “counting”, “addition”, “subtraction”, “multiplication”, and “division”.
- Creation of mathematics modules in GeoGebra for 6th-12th class
- Localization and context-aware content.
- Sustainable and Systematic approach.
- Open, inclusive, and documented.
Adoption:
- Small private schools are facing real challenges to compete with the larger groups so we will offer them our content free-of-cost that will become their value-added service and competitive advantage.
- We will offer our volunteer services to public schools as well.
- Our content will be open and free with detailed documentation and tutorials so anyone can use, reuse, and contribute.
We are looking forward to starting a healthy discussion and dialog.
Tahir Ramzan 