Today’s education system has a weak beginning

Today’s education system may be good to score marks, butfails to retain the knowledge once students have completed their examinations. This leads to young minds being stifled at an age when they should be asking questions, learning and gaining knowledge, and developing a thirst for more knowledge.

If we need to solve this dubious mystery about why Indians, for decades, have not been able to invent or innovate something that could revolutionise the way we live, the answer may well lie in the kind of education system we have right from early schooling days.
Our basic education system is rigid, rusty and mundane. Among schoolchildren, it hardly evokes an interest that could ignite a scientific spark to carry forward in their lives.

That’s why we lack innovating or inventing capabilities despite the fact that lakhs of engineers and scientists graduate from their respectable academic institutions year after year, but go without making any substantial contributions to the existing scientific knowledge pool.

That’s again the reason why we have remained a country that squarely depends on foreign countries for our wares and we have remained fairly satisfied with the inventions of ‘zero’ (~400 BC) and pickles!

In 2000, Professor VK Aatre, then the chief of Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) and scientific advisor to defence minister, when asked why India was taking such a long time over developing the power plant for the country’s indigenously developed light combat aircraft, said: “We are a country which has not even indigenously developed a car engine. Do you expect us to come up with an aircraft engine for a quality fighter plane in a jiffy?” Now, 11 years later, the engine in question — Kaveri — continues to be in its stages of development, but it is no longer indigenous. And because Kaveri is still under development, we are forced to power the LCA prototypes using the American GE-F404 engines.

For that matter, the indigenous component of the aircraft that Kaveri was to power, the light combat aircraft, itself — planned to be 100% when its idea was conceived — has shrunk to below 70%.

Besides, despite the daily lives of common people riddled with a range of problems — be it water shortage or pollution in the cities, rising fuel prices, or mass transport systems — hardly an Indian has come forward with innovative ideas or an invention that could solve the problems or even mitigate them.

This speaks volumes — negatively — about the quality of our scientific human resource pool. And we have nothing but our basic education system to be blamed.

Savitri Rao, mother of an 11-year-old studying in fifth standard in an ICSE school in Bangalore, complains that the manner in which her son is being taught restricts him from actually thinking about what he is doing. “It’s a rut more than anything else,” says the disgusted mother. “And it hardly serves any purpose except for a sheet of paper that will be the licence to study further; nothing more,” she adds.

For instance, in mathematics, there are several ways a particular problem can be solved. “But here, what I see is that although he gets the answer right, his marks are deducted because he has used a different method than what his teacher taught him. It is evident that the teachers want them to do precisely what they teach them, and the children blindly follow this rote learning, bookish ways,” says Rao.

In a situation like this, it also restricts the children from questioning teachers as to why they can’t resort to other methods when they too are the right ways of solving the sums; or even raising doubts or queries about something that they feel needs to be done.

The result is this: “You sit with him and observe his way of studying, not just mathematics, but any subject; and you realise that what he is doing is not actually learning, but cramming and mugging to score marks,” says Rao.

Educational and psychological experts admit that such a style of studying may be good to score marks, but they fail to retain the knowledge once they have completed their examinations. This leads to the young minds being stifled at an age when they should actually be asking questions, learning and gaining knowledge, and developing a thirst for more knowledge. This is the seed that ignites inventive and innovative tendencies among the children even as they grow into adulthood.

Teachers that DNA spoke to say it is the system that makes the children resort to rote learning. “Students are ambitious and they also have this uncertainty about their future. And they have the fear of failure. Scoring high marks is the main objective and that is padded with pressure from all sides — from peers, teachers and parents. The students really don’t care about the methods they opt for studying as long they get the marks,” says Sheila Iyengar, a senior teacher in a reputed city-based school.

Worse, during class, the questions coming from students are conspicuous by their absence. Moreover, if questions do come from children, teachers tend to play them down or ask the children to just pay attention so they get it right. Some parents even complain about their children being ridiculed by teachers on raising queries in class.

Here lies the problem as explained by Iyengar. “I think one of the main reasons is deadlines. We have to adhere to portions that are to be covered in a 40-45 minute class-hour. So within this time, it may cause inconvenience for teachers to answer in detail a question that is being asked by a student,” says Iyengar.

She adds: “Sometimes, we don’t even know if it’s a genuine question or not. Some of them might want to jeer the teachers. Or sometimes, we might not be able to give an answer immediately. We would have prepared for the class according to the particular portion. Any doubts or questions that come, even if related to the portion, might be a difficulty. In such cases, we either tell them that we will get back to them during the next hour or we merely admit that we don’t know about it.”

Manjula Raman, principal, Army Public School, agrees. “I think stress is part of life. In teaching, it’s because of the method. After an hour of Math classes, a totally different subject is being taught. There’s no closure.”

She feels the present education system does not allow a child to relax and learn or think about what he or she has learnt. “Schools have now become more like a growing industry. Rather, it should be more organic. Growth should be there from all sides,” she says.

Teachers admit that the problem rises from the class-oriented, syllabus-based teaching methods resorted to by the prevalent education system in India — a system in which the only thing that children wait for is the bell that marks the end of a class or the school day.

Raman, however, has a solution to this. “In the future, our country will need people from all walks of life. In schools, children need to be introduced to the basics of everything that matters to his/her life. There should be general studies, which covers the basics of all subjects. Emphasis must be given to on the child’s logical and critical thinking because at the end of the day it is about what the child has learnt, and not the number of lessons covered.”