Possible solution for SDG4:Quality Education 1

Possible solution for SDG4:Quality Education

Aarush Mahajan and Pronoy Mitra

The Indian School

9 December 2021
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Problem Statement

In today’s times, almost everything has changed compared to what it was 100 years ago

but the ‘almost’ doesn’t include the education system because it has not changed in over a

century because of that the schools don’t focus on skill-development of a student. It focuses on

filtering students for colleges this only benefits some students at the cost of others, some who

might have the potential to develop not so common yet important skills are discarded. This only

lets some children get the quality education they need while others suffer.

Theory of Change Statement

The filtering of students cannot be stopped without a major change of the current

education system but we can incorporate skill-based learning with the current education system

where students can pick their own curriculum and are not forced to learn subjects that they don’t

want to, even for a few days a month. Skill-based learning is important because decacorn

companies like Google, Apple, Amazon etc. hire on the basis of ability to do a task rather than a

degree, in fact, more than 14% of people working at Google have never gone to a college.

Value Proposition

The project will provide different outcomes to different individuals because of the

freedom provided by the project but some expected common outcomes are

Increase in Individuality

The project will help students be more distinctive with different likings and dislikings

because after trying many things they will realise what they are really passionate about and what
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they don’t like this will help them be easily distinguishable among a crowd of people without

these qualities

Understanding that Failure is a Part of Learning

Skills are supposed to be acquired by doing, and the best way to master a skill is through

trial and error, unlike traditional knowledge-based learning where information is spoon-fed to

students and they are supposed to memorize it. This trial and error makes students learn a life

lesson and would not be scared after making a mistake and would work on fixing it.

Learning Many Skills

The students will have full control over what they learn, this will grant them a chance to

learn many things which they can use practically and not just theoretically. Having multiple

skills will also help them learn other skills because everything is really interconnected in the

practical world unlike in knowledge-based learning where students learn about 1 subject and one

subject only, they don’t get to know how something simple can be a product of many subjects.

Proposed Tools

● Staff

○ Teachers

○ Management

○ Other Staff (Like lawyers for making agreements with the school)

● Instruments

○ Computers

○ Scientific Equipment

○ Other Equipment (Things required for different types of skills)

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Financial Sustainability

The project is supposed to rely majorly on 2 sources of income, those being

● Donations from Individuals

● Fees from Partnered Schools

Most of the income will go towards the salaries of staff and the remaining will be used to buy

more equipment and hire new teachers both of these combined will help in the growth and cover

more subjects and skills, this initial growth will start the never-ending cycle of growth and help

reach the ultimate goal where all learning is skill-based.

Implementation

To implement the plan, we would first start with an initial investment to hire a few

teachers who can teach basic subjects (mostly extracurricular subjects like computers) and for

the equipment, we would be using the one that the school is able to provide after that we can start

becoming independent of the school and hire more teachers. After a certain point, we can start

expanding from a school to a few schools this will start the growth loop and help expand. If

everything goes to plan and this project starts changing the mentality of many people then it is

possible that the whole education system can be shifted to incorporate more skill-based learning

even if bit by bit. This will help reach the ultimate goal where all schools have skill-based

learning rather than knowledge-based learning.

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Outputs

Initially, we want to start with a single school, use their equipment and have a few

subjects. After the initial phase, we want to become completely independent of the school and

start expanding to other schools while also increasing the number of subjects and equipment we

have. We will keep expanding after the second phase and once all the students and parents

realise the importance of skill-based learning we could start to ask for changes in the current

education system and the authorities might start implementing more skill-based learning in the

curriculum. This will exponentially increase the amount of skill-based learning and help us

expand until all the schools are using skill-based learning to teach their students.

Long-Term Outcomes

Our long-term goals include reforming the education system to follow skill-based learning which

helps to achieve the ultimate goal of having quality education for everyone. Another long-term

goal is to change our strategy from teaching students to training teachers when skill-based

learning starts to get adopted because not all schools will want to outsource the teachers so we

can help train the school’s teachers with help of the experience we will have at the time.