Beyond The Classroom

Nurture responsible leadership by exploring the realm of ‘being’ against ‘doing’.

- Sandeep Kapur

The education system today is designed to impart distinctions to students through the use of terminology/language and concepts, that allows them to see the nuances of the field of study which are not apparent to others. For example, a medical student gets equipped with language (and of course concepts) that allows him to see human body differently from someone who has not studied medicine. What may be referred to as an ‘inflammation’ on the arm by a layman, may be referred to by a student of medicine using a specific and often complex word that sounds completely outlandish to others. And this term will be only one of the many complex words that could point to the possible cause of the inflammation.

Education systems help us understand distinctions that allow us to master a particular field of study by virtue of seeing the world (of that field) differently and in far more detail. The same is the case with engineering or law or botany and even business studies. And that has been the focus of our education system thus far. It equips us with the understanding of ‘what happens’ and ‘why’ better than others.

There is an increasing degree of interaction that is now getting built in most educational streams, specially schools, wherein students get to experience or at least interact with real-life situations and examine and apply the concepts learnt in the classroom.

Our ability to perform in real-life situations, however, calls for more than conceptual knowledge gained in classrooms and during interactions with the industry. As Steve Zaffron states in his book, the three laws of performance, “the way people perform correlates to how [a]situation occurs to them’, and not the way the situation is. Said differently, we do not see the world the way it is, we see the world the way we are.