Ashutosh Khurana, the CEO and founder of Mind Edutainment Pvt Ltd is a Bangalore based advertising manager-cum-hypnotherapist who does not believe in retrieving thoughts from a young mind, but believes in making children think the right way and helping them learn the most from their thoughts. A brief talk with him makes one believe that he has always known how to think and reinforces the power of the silence of the mind — the core value that dragged Ashutosh out of the corporate world and into entrepreneurship.
What is the objective of Mind Edutainment as an organisation?
At Mind Edutainment we promote the concept of ‘thinking development’ as an essential part of character building during the primary years of a child’s development. We have designed methods to make children see how their thoughts are processed and imbibe new ways of thinking through various experimental and research processes.
What led to the dive from the corporate world into children’s minds?
The birth of my first son (with Sangeeta, co-founder of Mind Edutainment Pvt Ltd) in 2002 made us realise that there is a vacuum in the current education system with regard to training young minds on thinking. Following this epiphany, we decided that we had to conceptualise and formalise our life’s learning into a programme and take it to schools — where the most important development of an individual happens.
Don’t you think
imparting ‘life’s learning’ is a bit too much for children?
(Smiles) I have learned, unlearned and relearned by making mistakes — the hit and trial approach — but with every experience I discovered that there was something more to learn. Since all of this learning happened in my mind I did not know how to apply it in reality. Now that I know how to train the mind, I call it ‘learning’.
What is the ‘My Thinking Programme’
all about?
It is an in-school programme for kindergarteners to Class 8 students, which directly develops higher order thinking skills (HOTS) without using academic subjects as an intermediary. It is infused with the academic curriculum of the school and is delivered as a regular ‘thinking’ subject within the school based on fundamentals of child development, human development, psychology and is based on the educational frameworks of Bloom’s and Anderson and Krathwohl’s taxonomy.
What techniques do you use to enhance the efficiency of the
programme?
It is a complete academic year programme where the ‘thinking class’ is done once a week. Each session is one hour long — including a few minutes of silence — and is conducted by trained ‘facilitators’ who visit schools as per the time table. Each child is exposed to 17-20 physical thinking tools in a year. There are assignments and worksheets to monitor the child’s development.
What kind of impact does the ‘My Thinking Programme’ have
on children?
We provide an environment for students to search for meaning in life’s little things, appreciate uncertainty, enquire responsibly and draw inferences for their own development. This in turn helps students take responsibility for their own learning, to be independent thinkers, to develop understanding of concepts, and seek answers rather than be quiet absorbers. We take full ownership of the child’s development process, unlike most of the other programmes.
How does one become a part of this
programme?
Schools just have to fill the query form on our website (www.mindedutainment.in) and we will contact you within 48 hours. Our representative will visit your school to demonstrate the programme in detail.
If you have questions about the programme, email me at ashutosh@mindedutainment.in