The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : School reform: learning from Iqbal

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Tuesday, Oct 18, 2005

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Opinion - Leader Page Articles

School reform: learning from Iqbal

Krishna Kumar

ShowingIqbalin every school and training college can make a difference to the nation's perception of the complex problems afflicting the system of education and the lives of children.

NAGESH KUKNOOR's film Iqbal poses a formidable challenge to school reformers. It tells the story of an Andhra farmer's son who wants to become a cricketer. He is bright but disabled: he can neither hear nor speak. Iqbal's mother appreciates his aspiration and encourages him, but father is deeply cynical. As the story unfolds, Iqbal's younger sister provides the key support he needs as he struggles to reach his goal, the only professional help available to him being an alcoholic teacher who couldn't survive the corruption entrenched in cricket.

The poetic perfection of Kuknoor's art conceals the nature and scale of the problem Iqbal iconises, namely the odds against rural children's educational advancement. We are accustomed to a system that lets 53 per cent of the children drop out before they complete Class VIII and fails millions among the ones who battle on. The overwhelming majority of the dropouts are village children, but the system victimises the urban no less, by insisting that the same shoe must fit all. Iqbal's aspiration to be a cricketer couldn't possibly have been fulfilled had he remained at school. Not just our schools, even the best of our colleges are committed to the 19th century ideal of an all rounder. Eccentric devotion to a single pursuit, so necessary to achieve excellence, is just not accepted. Had Iqbal remained at school, he would have been forced to get through Class XII with PCM, PCB, or commerce, and it is not hard to imagine what his fate would have been.

The film makes a short mention of his rural parents' inability to afford sending him to a school for children with special needs. The fact is that even in urban centres, such schools are rare, and ordinary schools have a long way to go before they can serve children like Iqbal in an inclusive environment that brings the best out of everyone. The kinds of investments required to equip schools to become inclusive have yet to be contemplated seriously. In teacher education institutions, as they are now constituted, the idea of giving every trainee the experience of working with children with diverse pedagogic needs sounds futuristic.

Most teacher training institutes focus on the fiction of a normal child. The pedagogic methods taught are geared towards transmitting the subject matter, popularly known as content, rather than towards observing how children with different interests and capabilities might relate to it and assimilate it into their own structures of thought. Differences of cognitive style and pace among children are simply ignored, with the emphasis being on the ability to reproduce what the teacher and the textbook say. Most schools are simply not equipped to look after children with disabilities, and teachers have no clue how such children would cope with the demanding examination system.

Iqbal's sister, Khadija (played with stunning spontaneity by Shweta Prasad), is able to play a crucial role in her brother's life because she has mastered sign language although she does not need it for herself. A few weeks ago, when debates on the National Curriculum Framework were raging, the suggestion that normal children should get a feel of braille or sign language met with the criticism that it would increase the curricular burden. Iqbal's sister reminds us why the idea is worthy of consideration. But the larger issue of burden deserves a sharp look from another angle in the context of Iqbal. Let us imagine that a few hundred teachers decide to take their children to a nearby cinema hall to watch Iqbal and then ask them to express their responses in writing or through drawing or some other medium. Someone in authority could easily see the time spent in such a project as a waste, and parents too would shout, "Iqbal won't get you through the board exam!"

Now that is true, and this is the problem. If something has aroused the child's interest or emotions to a high level, sustaining it at that level would require effort and time to be drawn away from routine teaching. This is something our system resists. It hates eccentricity, ignores predisposition, and punishes single-minded devotion to a particular subject at the expense of others. Education and exams seem a burden to so many precisely because everyone is assumed to be alike. The fact that many of our children excel despite the rigidities of our system encourages the popular argument that our system has rigour.

Reform is resisted on the ground that our professional emigrants do so well abroad. The highly competitive character of our system inadvertently conceals a major weakness, which lies in its inability to harness diversity of talent and bring the best out of everyone. A latent Darwinian streak in our socio-cultural ethos enables the system to justify a high rate of failure at every stage, starting with the primary but reaching its climax at Class X public examination. Any proposal to reduce exam stress is suspected to be a strategy to dilute standards. Apologists argue that stress is natural and even necessary to socialise children into the real world. To recognise that the suicidal stress our children face is a consequence of systemic malfunctioning requires a vast amount of professional awareness that decision makers, journalists, and parents lack in equal measure.

People who justify the status quo by citing the achievements of our emigrant professionals fail to notice how narrow this exported person-power is. No country can hope to build an industrial human resource by merely harnessing the cutting edge. It is the excellence of the average person that gives an industrial economy its edge. High quality leadership can hardly produce results without capable and reliable personnel to occupy the middle and lower rungs. An education system that does not allow half the child population to survive in the system long enough to move beyond Class VIII cannot serve a modern industrialising economy. The talent pool from which India draws its best is so limited, yet we feel smug and defensive about our best. Imagine how much better and greater in number our best would be if they were selected from a larger pool.

Iqbal draws attention to the unjust, and not merely wasteful, character of a system that places every possible obstacle before the rural child who aspires and strives to approach the starting line. Such a system places not just children but the nation itself under stress — by reinforcing a negative, discouraging ethos. Curricular reform, which includes reduction of load, implies an attempt to make life at school more intellectually challenging, not less. And diverse too, giving ample room to the arts, heritage crafts, sports, and work-related activities.

Only a comprehensive school curriculum can respond to the legitimate demand made for value-orientation. As Professor Kireet Joshi pointed out at the meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) at which the new National Curriculum Framework was approved, the proposals made for art, health, work, and peace education taken together are capable of providing a strong value-orientation to the child's life at school. The new Framework also makes a plea for relating teaching with children's life and learning outside, and for softening the boundaries between subjects. These ideas can help schools make classroom work more dynamic and capable of retaining children. Sceptics say that all this can't happen because good teachers are so rare.

Other kinds of critics say that emphasis on child-friendly pedagogies will weaken disciplinary mastery. Still others ask: "If exams become less stressful, how will children learn to be competitive?" Any proposal for change in education has been rightly compared to shifting a graveyard. Even the dead stand up and plead for the status quo. We are lucky to have a film like Iqbal for it offers a crash course in the psychology, sociology, and political economy of education. Those who have no time to read books and research studies can hopefully spare a couple of hours for Iqbal. Apart from showing how children's minds work, it establishes that teaching is essentially a relational activity.

Iqbal's strong motivation rekindles the burnt out flame of life's energy in his alcoholic teacher, played by Nasiruddin Shah. He works hard to take his pupil through the maze of middlemen while Iqbal's father is battling the new seed economy and bankruptcy. If Iqbal is shown in every school and training college, we can expect a difference in how the complex problems afflicting our system of education and the lives of children are perceived.

(The writer is the Director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training.)

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