At the Heritage School, we believe that it is our responsibility to reflect deeply on questions that are fundamental to education and its long-term vigour. Therefore, we are constantly evolving and embracing CHANGE as the quintessential component of being, living and learning. Only by questioning ourselves and involving all our stakeholders in this quest, can we rise above the mundane to provide learning that is relevant, interesting and challenging while also equipping us to stay abreast with the transformed educational landscape necessitated by the FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.
Questions We Ask Ourselves
Learning Environment
- Do schools provide a learning-centred environment?
- Is learning a joyful and enriching experience or a burden for a child?
- Is learning about finding one right answer or about nurturing perspectives and curiosity?
- Do children understand why they are learning what they are learning? Do they relate to it?
- Do children's interests inform all choices about curriculum, instruction, and scheduling?
Teacher Empowerment
- Are teachers truly empowered?
- As an organisation, have we empowered teachers to co-create experiences that result in true learning?
- Do they question familiar ways?
- Do they research and study or is there a stifling reliance on textbooks?
Curriculum & Teaching
- Do children's interests inform all choices about curriculum, instruction, and scheduling?
- Is the teaching organised around problems, projects and questions?
- Is it truly interdisciplinary as most of life is?
School Culture
- Does the school culture bring out the best in everybody?
- Is the culture more focussed on students' weaknesses than their strengths?
- Is the classroom experience about cooperation and self-esteem or comparison and ridicule?
- Is the acquisition of skills over-emphasised as opposed to being seen as a means to the end of understanding and communicating ideas?
- Do students spend so much time thinking about how well they're performing that they're no longer engaged with what they are doing?
Purpose of Education
- Is education a means to an end or an end in itself?
- If education is the journey as well as the destination, what needs to be the nature of schools and what kind of children would be nurtured in such schools?
At the Heritage School, it's our constant endeavour to seek answers to these pertinent questions. After all, these are the questions and answers that impact all stakeholders — children, parent community, school and society at large — at the most fundamental level.
For us, such questions and responses form the basic edifice upon which we have built our dharma (belief and values) and karma (doing and praxis). It is our firm conviction to continue asking such and other questions to arrive at the true meaning of education and learning.