Severine Rosario
Program Coordinator
Education is the powerful tool to empower people, to challenge their reasoning power and intellectual capability. Sadly, the present education system encourages a system that favours overemphasis on academic performance, primacy to established ideas without giving an opportunity to question, rigid systems and importance given to rote learning in the pursuit of marks. This has resulted in stifling children's creativity and has sidelined the power of rational, independent as well as scientific thinking.
Though the situations appear quite gloomy, it is refreshing to note that there are certain exceptions to the established norms. There are quite a few institutions which have deviated from the mundane by choosing the less trailed path of using innovative and creative methods and techniques to encourage critical thinking and learning among children, in the process making learning more real and fun-filled. In Mangalore, Centre for Advanced Learning (CFAL) with its capacious and beautiful campus has been creating ripples in the field of education for quite some time now with its students achieving outstanding performance in some of the toughest competitive exams for medical, engineering, math and pure sciences as well as scholarship exams like KVPY, NTSE or International Olympiads.
CFAL whose main aim is to make Math and Science fun and interesting and develop a strong foundational base, has hit the bull's eye tasting extraordinary success despite adopting unconventional methods of teaching students. Recently, one of its