Education has changed in a profound manner. Education had been pushed into narrow paradigm as only classroom learning. People have had only this limited worldview as education and that was the dominant thought. If you have attended school only then you would be deemed as educated. If you are not going to school and yet have excellent communication skills and technical skills in any area like, say, farming you would be labelled as uneducated. This classroom teaching was and still is to a larger extent very mechanical and full of biases. Students that are not confident or not socially active could not contribute and progress well.

In my time, it was only lecture based where teachers tell you or read off the book about something and then you have to answer questions at the end of the books that too were only descriptive with handful of pencil drawing to depict some scientific diagrams. It was not fully dependent upon teacher but on the system, if you have got a good teacher that would be awesome but sometimes that good knowledge authority is bad in steering students nicely through the system so they have good grades. Students remain very narrowly well focused towards what teacher is delivering and yet align it to steer the maze of the system. The thicker content-led textbooks also didn’t let teachers to broaden the topic. This very intense system had no scope for creative thoughts developments. The only resource for students was teacher and a very painfully written book.

Then as a teacher, I have seen nice text books with good pictures that could explain a phenomena more broadly. Over time creative books emerged that have lovely text styles and jokes around the topic; even holding those books in hands them gives a surreal feeling. That had set the tone of the idea that learning should not only be very serious thing but can be done in a joyous way. That was a shift from being only teacher centered to books as well. Then were also tasked to do some poster work and try out some interesting readings in front of whole class. The classrooms are more democratized that allow students to choose when to have a formative assessment and what homework they can choose from. This adaptive system is making students more independent in their learning. Now we had more resources for students.

Now with the advent of internet at the palm of hand, we are seeing new vistas of creative development with new plethora ways in which students can project their curiosity around a subject. They are now not only dependent upon the teacher-book duo but on a range of resources that also allow them to not only express a scientific topic just scientifically but as aesthetically as well.