What is Alternative Education

According our social circumstances and changing human nature, definitions of life and its related subjects are changing. Education is among such things which change often due to various states of affairs. Education is associated with social, political and cultural conditions and our life styles. So for the prior generation the need of education was different and for us it is something else.

From those days when education has become a symbol of status, the serenity of the subject got reduced as it became a race course where everyone wants to be on the zenith to get a better job and get settled. This thirst brought down the intellectual levels and at the same time humanitarian feelings from the people.

This situation needs to be changed and the first step towards the goal is alternative education. The term looks big but the meaning is very simple. Alternative education is nothing but the diverse method of teaching which includes more participation from students and teachers. In short we can call it as a collective effort from both teachers and students in the learning process. This method is being implemented in schools especially in international schools in India these days. The drastic change these schools brought to traditional way of learning is the involvement of learners into the learning process. Instead of going ahead with the regular syllabus, alternative education enforced activities into curriculum which will provide an in hand experience to students on subjects which they study.

Major benefit of such implementation is the eradication of difficulty in understanding of any subject. In this method students will learn things with their own experiments rather than theories. To make it understand easily we can take an example like Oakridge International School Bangalore who stands in front for their quality of education. The motto of the school is holistic education and they focus on experiential learning rather than the conventional routine. They have made their curriculum inculcating the values of existing theories with various kinds of experimentations and have incorporated en number of workshops on various science, arts, social, and sports subjects so that children will get on location knowledge outside the class in a different atmosphere.

Hopefully these days we can see numerous best schools in India switching from the traditional method to alternative education so that they can build a generation who is intelligent at the same time have compassionate and humanitarian feeling based on a strong cultural background.