EQUBE - Life Education Program for Students

EQUBE - meaning E³ - stands for Enabling Evolutionary Excellence, a vision that we at EFIL live by!

This uniquely designed program for schools aims to impart objective life education that plays a vital role in nurturing young minds into fine human beings who form a major building block in the progress of the nation.

Program and Evaluation Details

In the recent past, ‘Life Skill’ education has received unprecedented response from all educational forums globally. Several happenings in the world over the last decade have raised serious concerns about the role of Education and its impact. The examples of Enron and World com showed that education was not nurturing ‘human beings’ to be ‘human’ with a reflective quality that enables them to make the choices that would truly add value in the larger context. 

‘It is important to know what I am capable of. It is even more important to know what I am using my capabilities for’ (Sampath 2003).

A lot of effort is invested in building capabilities, but an equal amount of time is not invested in building the deeper level of enquiry process that helps integrate life. And that is what “Life education” can do.  While Education focuses on equipping individuals with knowledge and information, Life Skills focuses on building the capability and competence to use that knowledge.

What is life education? How is it different from life skills?

Life education can be seen as being more holistic and evolving, enabling better integration than life skills.

• Life education facilitates the ability to be context-sensitive: while it includes Life Skill, it goes beyond how one uses their skills in enhancing the quality of life. For example, intelligence can be used to manipulate a situation to suit one’s achievement of a goal, or the same intelligence can be used to create and contribute to larger well-being. Similarly, communication abilities when sharpened as skill can be used to put down someone while the same skill can be used to develop a person.
• Life education aims at facilitating the deepest level of discrimination and enables the person to be appropriate to a given context.
• Life education instills an understanding of the knowledge while Life skill brings in various methodologies to obtain the knowledge. For example, I know mathematics is a difficult subject for me but my understanding of this knowledge will give me what, why, when, where, who, and how mathematics tends to become difficult for me. This enquiry brings forth an insight into me, my learning styles, and the orientation I have towards learning.
• Life education teaches one to work at a cause level - the beliefs that govern the behavior. It shows a path to handle issues in life at a ‘belief’ level rather than ‘behavior’ level. Behaviour is only a representation of the beliefs that govern them (Sampath, 1999, 2006).

Over a hundred years ago in the east, especially in Indian context, 90% of education was about life while 10% revolved around subjects. Now, the percentages have turned the other way. Education predominantly seems to be information and subject driven. Life education helps the child look at life more holistically in a way that enhances the quality of life based on the choices they make. 

Further, with the onset of ‘consciousness era’ and the children who are much higher in their capacity and capability, education needs to respond to their ability to enquire, understand, and integrate learning in life. Else, the children lose faith in the system and therefore develop indifference and restlessness. The research on indigo children (Carroll and Tober 1999) indicates the implications of the same:

• In order to address the children of this new era, learning about life needs to be a process of enquiry rather than prescriptive.
• It has to be experiential in nature than just theoretical
• Learning’s should have adequate space to be integrated in life and should relate to everyday life. Exploration therefore is more welcome than monologue.

With these factors in mind, we at EFIL have designed a Life Education Program that suits the enquiring mind. This program is named EQUBE – meaning E³ – which stands for Enabling Evolutionary Excellence.

To Know More.....

Description of the life education module and process

This understanding forms the basis for the module curriculum outlined in the following sections. The module starts at grade III level (children around 7- years) and completes at grade X (children around 15-16 years).

Grade Three to Grade X modules

SAP-Social Action project

Tools and Processes 

Final remarks

The essence of EQUBE is about self-directed performance and self-evaluation. It is about learning that will be handy when children step into life after tenth grade. The purpose is to give them opportunities to learn and move towards becoming self-sufficient individuals with a higher level of clarity to deal with life. We expect the parents to understand this purpose and participate in helping the child grow and evolve into a finer human being. This calls for a perspective shift:

•   From Comparison to Conviction
•   From Reaction to Response
•   From Monitoring to Trust
•   From being parents to also being friends with a possibility of co-evolution