Once a great man said,
I hear and I forget,
I see and I remember,
I do and I understand.
By the age of one, we all have the painful encounter with the experiential learning when we tried to walk, failed, fell and cried. And even though it was an unpleasant and discouraging exercise, in the end we all made it. Experience of a person develops from its childhood. They learn to speak their mother tongue from what they hear. They learn to walk by the steps they take in their infancy. Such basic needs are intact to a person from the experience they gain. Therefore, it is vital to make modern education on an experiential basis.
Experiential learning literally means learning that involves experience or observation or both. Through every passing year the ideology of learning keeps on changing, keeping in mind the requirement of the time. The biggest impact of learning style is often observed on children, as it moulds them accordingly for the future. Hence the most appropriate learning method is the one that is not only equipped with the tools of the present but also provides opportunities to adapt in the future. And the current requirements list has skills as well as the technique on its priority and both of them can only be derived from experience and observation.
Consider a situation in which one teacher asks a class of first or second standard “What is the quotient and remainder after you divide 12 by 5?”. And another teacher asks “If you have 12 rupees and you have to buy candies out of it of 5 rupees each. How many candies will you be able to buy and how much money will you be left with?”. In which case the class will grasp the concept faster. You can see the difference and so the studies say that Retaining knowledge becomes faster. The knowledge which is gained from the books are theoretical however to make it etched in the minds of the students experience of the read knowledge is required. To take it to a more realistic level, modern technique of machine learning namely Generative adversarial network is based on learning from previous experience.
Fundamentally, an idea of learning from experience caters to the ability of humans to learn from its failure. Apart from inculcating in modern education, experiential learning provides moral assistance. A human learns more easily when he does the task. We all remember sitting at the last benches and daydreaming about the weekend plans while the history teacher telling us about our vast, proud history or a chemistry teacher teaching us various reactions. What a great opportunity it would be for a person to study history in a museum or Chemistry in a laboratory i.e., seeing it, not just reading it. Experience never fades rather it piles up each day and helps the child to proceed toward its goal.
With the rise in ratio of qualified individuals, the race in future is expected to become tougher along with more sprinters and narrower tracks. Every year a humongous number of young minds graduate from institutions all over the world. But quite opposite to the ideal conditions of all of them transforming into a workforce. We experience a surge in unemployment. The sole reason behind this is the uneven score of these people on the scale of skills and real time based knowledge. For instance, if a pottery student has only seen someone doing pottery or in the worst case has just read about, the pots that he will produce are unlikely to have a smooth finish or the strength that the vessel must possess. This makes it very clear that knowledge without experience and skill can do good to none.
In addition to this the experience and observation of learning can awaken passion for it or even a realization of whether you really want to pursue learning in that field. Experiential learning is the window from which you can look at the world and future ahead with the perspective of that knowledge. In short, experiential learning will aid children to have foresight and not be myopic in any aspect.
Way back, even Aristotle told that,
“ For the things we have to learn
before we do them,
We learn by doing them.”
SALUTATIONS !!!