Prof Yash Pal
The title of my article is a bit unkind, even a bit presumptuous. It implies that by and large our education system is not quite in tune with parameters of the Real India and, further, the education that we give is somewhat ritualistic and remote from reality. This seems a rather irresponsible generalisation in respect of a very large and diverse system. But the sheer cussedness of much of what we do cannot be highlighted except through such a generalisation.
I am aware of the fact that we do produce some excellent people. I suggest that some people would come out excellent no matter what the system, and often without being touched by any formal system. The fact that in a country of 950 million we manage to select a few thousand individuals through a tough and painful filtration process who, after their training as engineers, migrate abroad in large numbers and prove reasonably successful, only shows that in some of our institutions we don’t quite succeed in demolishing everyone completely.
We are very far from being able to provide universal primary education to our people. Even if we were to open many more schools of the type we have now, this situation will not alter in any significant manner, unless we simultaneously make drastic changes in the teaching and learning system, as well as the relationship of the school with its neighbourhood. Some justification for this statement will be given below.
More than 50 of a 100 children who enroll in Class 1 drop out by class 5, and 75 by Class 8. Only 5 to 10 graduate from the high school while barely one or two clear the plus two stage. Out of a hundred students appearing for the hsc examination every year less than 50 pass! This goes on year after year.
Whenever we look at this data, we blame our teachers, bemoan the poor state of school facilities, lack of parental guidance, poor textbooks, etcetera etcetera.
It has become mandatory for students to take expensive tuitions or join not-so-cheap coaching classes in order to get high marks. It helps a great deal if your parents are well-placed and well-educated. If they can speak English, it is an added advantage.
I suggest that all these are just symptoms of a deeper malaise. Three years ago a committee set up by the Human Resources Development Ministry submitted a report entitled “Learning without Burden”. I happened to chair this committee. The concern of the Minister was with the much talked about burden of the school bag.
This report has been widely discussed in a number of meetings and seminars. The Central Advisory Board on Education held special meetings to consider the report. Schools and teachers’ associations have organised discussions and seminars. Questions have been asked in the Parliament about its implementation and a special monitoring cell has been set up in the ncert for the purpose. Yet no visible difference is seen in the operation of the school system. Most children continue to carry heavy bags, the syllabi have not been revised, teachers have not been given more powers to decide what to teach when, the emphasis on rote learning has not diminished, understanding does not have a premium, examinations, tests and competitions still dominate a child’s existence.
Some people may argue that learning is foreign to our temperament, that we belong to an inferior species and that the only thing we are fit for is training – for something that others have already thought out in detail and worked out as a training package. It may be suggested that most of our children are dull and, in any case, their living conditions discourage an interest in things that are academic or reside in the world of concepts. One might further argue that, being aware of this, the teachers also emphasise rote learning and so do the examining bodies!
As soon as you begin to equate rote learning with learning or understanding, it is only a small step from there to come to the conclusion that education need not be connected with specificities of the child’s environment or even with any questions or answers the child formulates or derives from her life outside the school. Indeed, in our studies we found that most children believed that there are two kinds of knowledge — one that has currency in real life and another that can be acquired at school. This tends to complete the circle. A large fraction of children find learning without comprehension burdensome and drop out unless they are kept there through parental pressure or are lucky enough to have exceptional teachers and a learning environment at home.
I sometimes wonder whether our tendency to separate life from education is a cultural trait coming to us from a distant past. In the Brahminical tradition of education for the elite, we tended to divide life into periods: there was one period when we only acquired education, and the rest were lived on the strength of what we had learnt in that young phase. In contrast, our society at large did recognise the importance of learning from the world and experience, and that is why it kept most of its children away from school!
Schooling was meant to provide status without any need for physical toil, and without too much contamination from the business of living. It is quite possible that this inherent tendency of formal education in our society was fortified by Macaulay’s design of our education system in the 19th century. The purpose of education was not to commune with life, but to acquire skills that could fit us in machines made by others for their own benefit. Bereft of living challenges, our education has kept chasing tokens of excellence that are evaluated with measures that are either mindless — like distinctions based on a difference of less than half a percent in aggregate marks — or borrowed from abroad.
It is a credit to the resilience of our youth that some of them escape lasting damage to their personalities. But many others with sharp perceptive powers or unusual creative abilities regularly fail or drop out.
Most of the things that define India are created and sustained by people who acquire their sensibilities, skills and crafts outside our formal education system. Most of the skills in our society are acquired by observation and experimentation. I do not want to suggest that what people learn in this manner is all we need. We do need new materials, new technology, computers and information infrastructure. However, what I do want to assert is that it was foolish on our part to separate the formal education system from those who are close to the soil and work with their hands. We did this by not giving any place in the curriculum to externally acquired skills, knowledge and capabilities.
On occasions when I talk of this to bureaucrats fascinated by imported-technology, they tend to dub me as a romantic or accuse me of trying to obstruct modernisation in the country. I maintain that we should in earnest begin mixing the insulated and barren ‘know why’ that we try to dispense in our educational institutions with the empathy and ‘know how’ acquired through actual work and the traditions embedded in our society. Only then will we begin to produce inventors, engineers and scientists of the highest caliber. That is how true modernisation will arrive.
Yash Pal is National Research Professor, Government of India
Source: Tehelka
