The Future of Education

Teaching has been considered the most noble profession because of the nature of work and the kind of responsibility one takes for nurturing talent. Though the responsibility of a teacher to nurture talent remains intact, the nature of work or rather it can be called process of nurturing talent has changed over a period of time. In the days of oral tradition, teachers were regarded as the only store house of knowledge but when the writing and printing started books supplemented teacher and students became less dependent on teacher for information. With the advent of information technology and internet today teacher’s role in nurturing talent looks very different. Students no more rely completely on their teachers for information because information is available all the time on their electronic gadgets. What they look for from their teachers is to how to use the available information and convert them into knowledge. Hence todays teaching requires a drastic make over. That’s why world over the focus of teaching is shifting from objectives of teaching a course to learning outcomes of a course. This paper discusses the importance of teaching where not only learning outcome of knowledge and mechanical application are emphasized but also goes beyond this and aims at developing the skills of independent learning, critical thinking and inquiry. Hence this paper outlines an inquiry based outcome oriented education to meet the challenges of education in the information age.

Key words: education; learning outcome, information age, inquiry based teaching