Vijay Garg
How much difference is there in maths of school going and street vendor children. A research has revealed this. There is a big difference between maths taught in school in Indian children and maths working in real life. This disclosure has been revealed by a recent new research. Study suggests that while school-going children are good at Academic Maths, children working in the market can solve complex transactions mentally quickly, but they struggle in school’s Maths.
The study has been done by the team of researchers including Nobel laureate Esther Duffalo and Abhijit Banerjee. They tried to check whether mathematics skills obtained in real life can be useful in school and whether mathematics techniques learned in school work in the real world of life. Researchers studied in Delhi and Kolkata markets with 1,436 child vendors and 471 school children.
In this study, it was found that the child vendors can solve complex mental calculations without any help in their sales transactions, but the same problem when given to them in books is not able to solve them. School children, on the other hand, are good at solving the textbook questions of Maths, but they are not able to calculate the actual transaction that happens in the market.
All the children involved in this study were under 17 and were mostly 13 to 15 years old. Less than 1% of the children employed were able to solve practical market problems that a third of the working children had solved easily. It shows that working children use mental shortcuts, while school-going children depend on slow, written calculations.
Researchers believe that the education system in India has failed to overcome this gap, where there is no synergy between school and real-life Maths. The study has been conducted by researchers from MIT, Howard University, and other entities, and it has been published in the Natural Journal.
There is no connection between home and school knowledge in the school education system, which is not only bad for school education, but also does not help recognize a lot of talent that already exists. He says that the course needs to be re-thought, so that children can be taught by adding both types of Maths. This research also revealed that when an unusual amount of goods were bought from children, such as 800 grams of potatoes and 1.4 kilograms of onions, most children calculated correctly without any assistance. But when they were given questions of school’s maths, very few of them were able to answer correctly. This study tells us that children in school are taught Maths only as a curriculum, and when they try to apply it to him in real life, he doesn’t work.
Vijay Garg Retired Principal Educational Columnist Gali Kaur Chand MHR MALOUT Punjab
