Multicultural Education is known as an educational procedure / strategy which fuses the perspectives, writings, values, convictions, and viewpoints of people from distinct social foundations. The primary function of putting it into practice in classrooms is to allow educators to adjust or join exercises to highlight diversity and social pluralism. We will discuss various disadvantages and advantages of educational method. Multicultural education came into the limelight in the early 1970s, following the action plan for change in the education system by the civil rights struggle. The goal was and continues to be to assist, appreciate cultural diversity amongst teachers and students. Multicultural educated students are often best prepared to work in a variety of classroom or commercial establishments and have a strong social intelligence.   

Race, ethnic background, nationality, language, religion, class, sexual orientation, etc. are the critical elements involved in multicultural education. Students can be constantly reminded of history, cultures, and the importance of various groups by adapting it in schools and colleges. It also promotes the ideals of inclusion, democracy, diversity, critical thinking, and sense of unity, inquiry, outlook values and many more positive traits. This teaching strategy is seen as profitable in advancing educational achievements among students of foreigners (immigrants), and it is along these lines that it is given credit to be a contributor to the school reform movement.

Many genuinely think that Multigrade or cross-cultural education’s goals and objectives are to safeguard the culture of minority groups by encouraging young people to think broadly and get to know new thoughts and critical thinking. All this quite fundamentally helps students deduct, just as it urges them to have an increasingly open worldview. As a result, students are provided with the knowledge, beliefs, and skills required to engage in social improvements, resulting in equity for ethnic groups previously marginalized and excluded.

Just like every other Multicultural Education system, there are a few benefits and drawbacks to it. The pros and cons are as follows:

Disadvantages of Multicultural Education:

Since children from diverse ethnic, linguistic and social backgrounds study together from the same education system in a multicultural classroom, making it difficult for everyone to understand the subject. There’s a possibility teachers may be struggling to find out how well the students understand the content. As not all students come from the same backgrounds this causes a language barrier. People may be non-confrontational, submissive or otherwise indirect from other cultures.

Teachers in inclusive education must be equipped to manage conflicts and misunderstandings with different values , beliefs, cultures, assertions, patterns of behaviour, etc. that tend to arise among students from different cultures.

Advantages of Multicultural Education:

Multicultural Education exemplifies students to different culture and values, and creates good understanding and acceptance of people’s differences. It instils tolerance and personal acceptance. Since it encourages cultural relevance, anti-bias classroom, challenging students to reflect without jumping to stereotypes, shaping social skills and social action resulting in people engaged in civic engagement. The method encourages students to assimilate while maintaining intact their culture and values, making them feel inclusive. It can help children assimilate without compromising their cultural identity by being culturally conscious teachers, without biasing. It facilitates promoting a community of learning, which helps to preserve a sense of pride which trust in the learning.

The World Economic Forum ‘s Future of Jobs Report has forecasted that 65 per cent of children entering primary school today will eventually wind up working in entirely new types of jobs that do not yet occur. The world is changing at such a rapid pace that today’s high-paid jobs didn’t even exist five years ago-and it’s hard to predict what kind of jobs we ‘re going to do in another five years. The reason for that big shift? It is rise of Software industry.

The question here is how we prepare our children for the future, there’s only one solution to this situation: Learning to code. Both parents and teachers believe that programming is a well-structured way of introducing children to logical thinking and problem-solving in a country like India, where the education system struggles with a lack of vision, facilities and outdated curriculum. This also trains them for a data-science and computer science driven job market.

Fewer than 10 percent of schools taught mathematics before the Industrial Revolution, each school introduced mathematics after the turning point, because that was the centre of the revolution. For us now, coding skills are what mathematics was to the Industrial Revolution: underestimated at the time, but extremely valuable generations later.

Now we’re in the middle of the computer revolution, and it’s the same concept: schools need to recognize the benefits of coding as a skill. For Chinese parents, teaching children code is just as important as teaching them math and Chinese. Indeed, even before they enter pre-school many Chinese kids are vulnerable to coding. A lot of Indian parents now also teach pre-school coding to children. A huge number of coding and programming centres in New Delhi, Mumbai, Gurgaon, and Chandigarh serve these needs in India.

Almost all of these places use a shared pool of tools and technologies — such as Code Studio, LightBot, Botley, or MIT’s Scratch — created for a foreign market where coding teaching is already a flourishing industry for children. The aim is to cultivate the ability in a child to develop a meticulous sequence of commands in a language which the computer understands.

In the next 5-10 years, it would not matter what school kids are attending school, but how digitally savvy these kids are, especially with the introduction of 5 G technology that would be paradigm shifting and upend conventional teaching methods. Economists estimated the total economic impact of 5 G on new products and services to reach $12 trillion by 2035 as 5G tries to move mobile technology from connecting with people to people and information, to connecting people to everyone. Hi-tech kids today are learning from the same books I used 10 years ago during my school time. Our school system promotes rote learning, and that promotes conformism in children rather than curiosity. There is a repetitious raj of learning which governs our schools.

If we don’t implement coding in schools then our kids will be in a massive disadvantage and the future will be shaky. In 2017, Delhi-based ed-tech start up Eupheus Learning launched Cubetto which was introduced at about 300 primary schools across India. Cubetto’s innovation is the block-based coding language intended for pre-literate-year children. It is a screen-less coding solution that teaches infants the basics of programming.

Most kids learn to tap and press and hold in the digital age of today before they can speak cohesively or walk. Its wireless pacifiers, friends and entertainers are smartphones and tablets. To do so, children do not need to be qualified in reading or writing because stories and pictures are used to illustrate the concepts.

We can’t rely on the government to formulate policy, top-down approaches are lethargic and bureaucratic that takes a lot of time to implement which our kids don’t have. In the 4th Industrial Revolution, parents and educators would have to take a proactive approach or our children will be left behind.

When class sizes are increased, everybody learns of the outrage in an attempt to prevent having to raise the budget substantially to bring a new teacher to a public school system. You’re probably aware that schools with smaller classes are more attractive than schools with big ones; but what exactly is so impressive about small classes? How do you want your child to get this? Smaller classes have several advantages you should consider carefully.

Small class sizes cause the teacher to pay more one-on-one attention. Let’s face it: teachers are overburdened. We are not paid approximately enough for the uncertainty we contend with on a regular basis, so they sometimes end up taking home jobs with them during the form of marking papers or preparing lessons. Instructors have the opportunity to know about each student as an individual thanks to lesser class sizes, continue to work with them to build their strengths and eliminate their weaknesses.

Instead of your student being just another face in a huge crowd, they will have a greater chance of developing deep and lasting interactions with the other students around them. That also has educational benefit: if your student has a schoolwork question, he will have a greater chance of knowing who to call for a quick chat.

Teachers are often said to be teaching to the lower middle of the class. Someone below that point will have to battle for themselves, sometimes left behind in the crowd, and everyone above that spends most of the class time day-dreaming while waiting for everyone else to finish studying a concept that they figured out ten minutes into the lesson. No matter which end of the spectrum your student falls on, the instructor is more likely to be able to customize the lesson so that it remains at their level in a small class.

When there are thirty-five students in the classroom, it does not matter how skilled the teacher is. There will be disruptions. Even the small task of encouraging students to work together on an assignment can lead to confusion as thirty-five voices fill the air and that’s assuming the classroom doesn’t come complete with one or two trouble-shooters. Worse, major, personality differences are more likely to occur in a classroom, and to occur in extremes. Discipline is starting to take up more of the time of class than real teaching. Discipline is expected much less frequently in a lesser student classroom.

The more the number of students in a classroom grows, the more time admin duties need to be used up each day. It becomes a massive undertaking to hand out papers. That’s all apart from the process of assessment, when teachers are less likely to provide individual feedback in a rush to get through a big stack of papers and more likely to give just that grade and a quick statement or two. They are still fairly quiet. Even when all are extremely excellently-behaved in the classroom, thirty-plus bodies in a classroom are noisy. There’s a constant clatter of papers in their seats, sniffing noses, students shifting. For a student with problems of attention, those small disruptions can be the difference between a lesson that is fully understood and one that they do not understand at all.

Many children have mathematical problems but some students find it much harder than others. These may otherwise be bright children who have a great understanding of logic and reasoning but still fail spectacularly on homework, tests, and quizzes. Over time, repeated mathematical poor performance can cause a student to become disheartened and believe that he or she is “dumb” or not good at the specific topic. Furthermore, as math is cumulative, falling back might mean that a learner forgets much of what is taught. It’s important to have basic math skills, no matter what profession an person chooses to pursue. This is why recognizing problems early on is important. With the right balance of classroom accommodation and learning strategies, each student will reach their full potential in mathematics.

There are several reasons why a child may have math difficulties at home, ranging from low motivation due to academic stress to a shallow grasp of how to apply and perform numerical computations. But sometimes the root cause of poor performance is something else, like a disparity in learning or a difficulty in motor skills.

Dyscalculia is the most frequently detected condition in which individuals struggle to perform simple arithmetic and have trouble attempting to manipulate numbers in the same way as their peers. Nonetheless, students with dyslexia may also have trouble with reading numbers and having to follow word problems with math at school. When doing paper work, they may rearrange digits, or correctly solve problems, but record their responses in the wrong way.

Children with ADD / ADHD have the capability to rush ahead and skip a step or struggle to focus and be unable to check their work once a problem is over. Students with dysgraphia and dyspraxia, who are having difficult time trying to write by hand, may become so overwhelmed by number formation that they make silly mistakes or get the steps in the wrong order in an equation. Finally, children with visual processing disorders may lack the visual-spatial learning ability necessary to align numbers, read graphs and perform basic geometric operations.

Math is one of the topics that both children and adults have little understanding of. This is because while pre-school maths are about realistic problem solving, patterns being observed, shapes being recognized in your environment and learning to count, secondary and high school math teaching is more abstracted. It often concentrates on rotary learning and solving equations in books – think arithmetic and time tables – that can turn off students and make them believe that math skills are not relevant to their daily lives.

Indeed, many students lament that math is boring. At school, they might not see the point of learning algebra, geometry or calculus. Or they may question why they need to be able to do basic arithmetic’s such as adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing by hand when they can easily find answers using a calculator or a computer.

The answer to this last point is multi-fold. One, you might not always have a calculator at your disposal; two, even if you do, trying to understand how and why to do it for yourself provides a stronger basis for future learning, and three, doing arithmetic is a mental form of exercise that strengthens your working memory.

Math is much more than arithmetical, though. Much of what goes into solving multi-step word problems is identifying the problem, choosing a suitable approach to solving it (there may be more than one), and following the correct operation order.

Some Valuable Suggestions:

Motivating and inspiring learners by demonstrating them real-world situations involving the use of math outside classrooms. Explain how math works, try and convince learners that it’s not all about arithmetic, and get them excited to give it a go and feel comfortable trying out different methodologies to problem-solving, even if that means they don’t always get the right answer.

The teacher gives visual explanations, demonstrates research on the wall, and uses physical objects that students can reach and push around, where possible. Multi-sensory feedback can improve learning by making it easier for students to interact with a lesson, and can also enhance memory content. It is extremely important to promote understanding of a subject that can be very abstract.

It can be daunting for the students to write down information and process it at the same time. It may also be that copying from the board can cause numbers to be transposed or recorded in a manner that makes no sense for the work any longer. It can help encourage a child to use a computer to take notes, or to pair them with a note-taking buddy.

Student loans have an overwhelming advantage: if money is limited, student loans enable you to go to school and get the diploma you need to make your career progress. But risks also arise when a student loan is taken, some apparent, some less apparent. The most real threat is that you won’t finish the degree program you ‘re taking the credit line for, and then you decide to leave school without showing anything except some disconcertingly large debts. An even worse risk, entirely understandable, is that you take the loan, complete the degree program, but then have a degree that is not commercially successful, that doesn’t get you the type of work you want, and that doesn’t increase your remuneration enough to compensate the debt you now have to pay off.

The way of reducing both of these risks is to do your homework before participating in a degree program, ensuring that students attending the program have a good success rate in actually completing it, and also ensuring that students who complete it have better job prospects at the end. According to a recent study the tuition fees in certain universities can alone cost  anywhere around $51,000.Remember that lodging, food , transportation and other housing expenses are not included in those numbers. So your college loans might also have to cover living expenses if being a full-time student prevents you from grabbing the kind of job that would normally allow you to cover them.

Consequently, if student loan debt may be an issue for you, choosing a school with low tuition costs is best and helps you to live in a neighbourhood where the cost of living is low. Even with taking a student loan comes less apparent risks. There’s an old proverb that says “the debtor is the lender’s slave.” Debt will transform you into a banks slave that loans your student loan. Many students taking out loans for education are inexperienced and have never had any major debts. Taking a student loan changes all that every month, removing a sizeable chunk from your pay check once you have to start paying off the loan.

The average student loan in the United States, across all age groups, is now (in 2014) around $25,000 and that number is increasing. The average student loan for the 2013 graduating American students is over $35,000 (ref). That’s not really a home mortgage, but it’s nevertheless a sizeable debt. The impressive sounding word “non-dischargeable” is another less obvious risk you face in taking out a college loan. Let’s say you’re overwhelmed by debt. One way out of this is to claim personal insolvency, which nullifies the debts. But a non-dischargeable debt is one you will never ever get rid of, not by filing bankruptcy, not by doing anything but to pay it off or to drop dead (literally).

The fine print on student loans commits you to pay back the debts irrespective of the hardships that you face in life. Student loans are financially unsustainable. Users can’t rid themselves of those debts. They’ll follow you all the way through your life till the time you pay them off.

It is worth stepping back and asking why student loans have become such a major issue for students and a concern. Believe it or not, back in the 1960s, students were not unusual to work during the summer and earn enough to cover a large proportion of their school expenses during the year. Much of this shifted with the 1965 Higher Education Act (re-authorized many times since). By permitting students to take out massive loans, they encouraged schools to raise their tuition rates (after all, students could now pay for the increase). This led to a negative spiral in which schools continued to raise their prices and the government continued to raise the amount of money it would lend to the students.

Conclusion:

You want to consider taking out a student loan very meticulously. Please ensure the expected return on schooling, and the degree the loan is supposed to secure is large enough. Not only does it need to cover the debt but it also needs to improve your career and life considerably. You buy an education by taking out a student loan. Make sure that you do get a good deal.

The children consider their schools their second home and teachers to be regarded to be part of the next parenting phase. We eloquently believe the phase of schooling tries to teach us many essential things. We come across various subjects and information, fitness, grooming, contact, principles and other characteristics important to live a productive life. In essence, teachers encourage students to face hurdles and tackle any situation in life. Although they teach us all of these values, there is one aspect unknowingly practiced by some schools — prejudice and preferential treatment to some students as teachers have their favourites.

A fortunate few students—those sweet, intelligent, smart, and well-behaved ones—are accustomed to their teachers’ wide smiles and open praises. Yet it’s a half-hearted greeting for some, just barely a glimpse. When asked, teachers will never confess to playing games except to themselves. While plainly obvious to students to see, teachers still conceal favouritism beneath a cloak of justifications such as “I don’t play favourites,” and “I just admire those of positive behaviour, so that others can imitate.”

Have we not learnt in educational institutions that everyone is equivalent and that everyone should be treated the same way? But the worldview is not sometimes taken up in the classroom. Some teachers pay extra attention and consideration to those students they admire, so they don’t want to acknowledge certain students or cultivate their natural abilities. Most students love to take part in contests, shows, etc., but teachers repetitively select students who are excellent and confident to win, after all, winning is a prestige issue. They fail to provide other so-called ‘ordinary’ students an opportunity to interact, communicate or highlight their secret talents. Every teachers must be aware that each and every student deserves a chance and should be assessed without any favouritism. Students may not win and may fail but they should be motivated by a teacher to try and help them try again until they excel.

You can train and mentor the not-so-brilliant students to take their performance results to the next level. It will take persistence and time but a satisfying path to see a student succeed would be the speed of progress. While passively passing comments and elevating smart students will demoralize other students, which will lower their self-esteem and denying them the incentive to do better.

Favouritism can lead somebody to question their capabilities and relevance. If somebody starts feeling inferior, he or she might begin to doubt his or her self-worth. Often picking the clever ones is never a positive deed and if they just put their sights on the fast learners, then can a instructor pull out the best from other pupils. Teachers should seek to comprehend each student, rather than just favour a few, and help them further. The extreme bias of teachers is one of the main reason why some students cook up some excuse not to go to school or to leave the school.

If teachers are open-minded, acknowledge and respect the views of their students, the students would be better off. It is natural that teachers should be attracted towards certain pupils, but a teacher must be smart enough to understand those feelings and be clever and patient enough not to reveal their interests to any student in some particular way. As long as a teacher has strong communication skills in the classroom giving priority to each student, no harm is done. The educational objective is to bring out the best in each student. Although it is not as straightforward as it appears at first, teachers must listen to the needs of all their students. After all, instructors are seen as the second parent; affection and attention of parents must be equally distributed among their children — regardless of the child’s characteristics.

Teachers are the truly revolutionary catalyst. It will help to mold a productive, effective and efficient person by treating students fairly and constantly to boost their confidence. Educating children is a teacher’s role: make sure you do it right.

Technology has become an essential aspect in today’s age we live in. Every day there is some new device or applications which makes life easier and improves on the already existing technologies and processes. However, making life easier isn’t the only part that technology plays in our lives. In education technology plays a significant role. As technology advances, it is employed in the learning process to support students of all ages.

In-class teachers can help students adsorb the material. For example, since some people are visual learners, computer-linked visualization screens may allow students to see their notes rather than just having to listen to a lecturer. People can use software to augment your class curriculum. The programs provide study questions, tasks, and even practice tests for a class which can help students to continue learning process. Technology is also becoming part of many teaching methods, beyond computer and technology classes as well. Students use technology to solve presentations and use the internet to study paper and essay subjects. In computer and tech classes, students also learn to use the technologies available to them.

This guarantees that they will be able to use this information in a workplace environment after graduation, which can give them an advantage of someone in their own school setting who has not had access to a particular technology or software. Students should have more access to educational opportunities like these as technology progresses. Whenever anything new and “better” is revealed, the “older” technology becomes much more affordable, even when schools are on a tight budget, allowing it to be used in educational settings. Technology has already been progressing to support kids before they have begun school.

Educational video games and programs for young children help them train for the school and get a massive advantage on their education in some situations. There are critics who might argue that technology “spoils” youngsters. Rather than, for example, being able to put a long list of numbers in their minds, they switch to a calculator. No matter what such points might be, technology is an integral aspect of the culture today. Students will be better equipped to transition from classroom to workplace by incorporating it into the classroom.

Technology is making the students much more efficient than they had been. As has already been said, technology education is no longer constrained by regional borders or any given time as a result of using it. Due to the introduction of technology, the students now have the means to keep studying independently. This is how the teachers had made the teachers even more successful.

Technologies has helped students to get hold of and watch videos and films about topics they may be going to study about right now. Indeed, a number of schools and colleges are also known to show their students motivational videos on a routine basis. This helps them to be positive in any and every work they do. This will support them both in their academic careers and in their professional careers.

Conclusion:

Much like a coin having two sides, Technology always comes with its adverse effects. Even as technology does have certain benefits, there too are certain disadvantages. Ultimately however, it all depends on the users, or rather how they use the technology. However, there is nothing to deny that there are plenty of benefits to be gained from using technology when used in a positive way. It will may be an absolute blessing for them.

Knowledge is defined as familiarity with anything that may include certain facts, information about a specific subject area, definitions of the experiment or study, or skills acquired through training or experience. Knowledge can be of two different types:

Theoretical knowledge can be attributed to the theoretical clarification of a specific subject or area in which a person has a clear understanding of the things going around and the theory of their work, but cannot manage things.

For example, if a person examines a car and its engine parts from manuals and presentation slides in a classroom, he will, of course, have knowledge of what the components of the car are, and what the underlying theory is, but one would lack practical information about it. The utility of the car for him is zero in the absence of this realistic knowledge. Without proper practical knowledge, he cannot drive the vehicle, he cannot repair it in the circumstance of any accident, and he knows nothing about its mechanisms. Theoretical knowledge could be something that can help a person gain a strong grip on practical knowledge. Knowledge is incredibly important to any genetic career and life.

The world is changing day by day, and every day we are becoming more and more advanced which needs a lot of changes from some of the previous traditional techniques that have been adopted. Rapid changes in working life, society and IT have increased the demands of expertise in every field. Today there is a need for qualified experts who are expected to have detailed understanding, excellent social and communication skills and who can use their skills in a constructive way in life.

Importance of Practical Learning:

Can you envision someone teaching you to scuba dive or drive a vehicle, inside four classroom walls? Can’t do it!! You have to get into the water to learn how to swim, and to learn how to drive, you have to be out on the road. Some topics are competency-based and directed to practice. Training will back up abstract experience of skill-based topics. Subjects such as teaching and engineering are based on skills. Practical knowledge is therefore more important in these topics than abstract knowledge. Practical research involves laboratory studies, study trips, tasks, assignments etc. The rewards of practical work are unprecedented. Having abstract knowledge has little meaning unless it is applied to practical purposes by the students.

Practical or informal knowledge is manifested as abilities or “know-how.” Practical knowledge is crucial to understanding how things actually work. It becomes relational and social in nature as it happens and evolves in certain particular contexts where it is practiced, and lets you obtain the basic skills that are the tools of your trade.

Practical understanding by the process of doing and personal experience leads to a much deeper comprehension of a concept. In our real day-to-day job realistic experience is considered to be of considerable value. There are also things that you can only know by seeing and witnessing; no matter how hard you try to understand this by abstract means. For example, if you’re trying to learn how to drive a bicycle for the first time in your life  by theoretical means, you ‘re likely to spend your whole life learning, and still can’t ride without proper practical training. Where theoretical knowledge is often learned through the notion of a vacuum, practical knowledge on the other hand is understood by real life experiences. The basic distinction between theoretical understanding and realistic understanding is that theory guides you through the experience of others, whilst you prefer to learn from your own experience of the actual task in reality. 

Conclusion:

It’s very important that each individual has enough knowledge to lead his life smartly and successfully. It doesn’t matter if you’re a student, a professional or an entrepreneur. Knowledge in an individual’s life really is something significant. It is important to acquire theoretical knowledge, but it is of no use without practical experience. Practical knowledge encourages an individual to accomplish something he studied about. Not only in professional life, it’s worth noting; you need to have a good, realistic approach for your life in general. Therefore, for growth development and use of your knowledge, it becomes really important that you also have a practical edge, otherwise there is no point in having theoretical knowledge when you cannot apply it in reality as well.