Blooms' taxonomy.

Selecting your child's school is an excruciating and painful experience. Expectations are magnanimous; reality is horrendous. Only a few possibilities can spare you from this conundrum: either you refrain from having kids or they are not of school age yet. Living abroad is also an option, but only for a handful.

The masses in Pakistan have to just sit and watch their kids spending years in schools and failing to be competent enough to compete internationally. In schools, the course content is obsolete, teaching methodologies are ancient and assessments are not even close to a global system.

Sadly, despite parents' sheer hard work, their kids tend not to reap fruits they had initially expected. The question remains: What do our school lack? More interestingly, why do all these subjects of work ethics, personal virtues fail to express themselves in our society? Why is the country being relegated to worst rankings in corruption, rule of law, civic sense, road accidents, safety, physical and mental health? Why is novelty rare and polarisation in abundance?

These are hard questions, but if we linger on to answer and address them, the future is going to be even harder for our generations who are unable to practise and project what is contained in their books. Did our schools ever gauge how much our students actually learn from what is taught to them?

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom and his collaborators published a framework for categorising educational goals; taxonomy of educational objectives. It answers some of the above-mentioned questions and our turmoil.

Familiarly known as Bloom's taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teachings across the United States of America and in other developed countries. This framework revolves around six major categories, most of which are rare across the length and breath of our educational system.

What we focus at home is rote learning-the ability to reproduce the content after cramming it. Sadly, it is even celebrated as our exams are tailored to test this very ability.

Premium schools in Pakistan even struggle to fully implement Bloom's leaning pedagogies in their classrooms. The teachers are barely trained and the administration lacks the will. Only those lucky ones who have educated parents or who can afford to have coaching classes develop some...