Does real learning take place in schools?
PILLAI SHIVARAMAKRISHNAN THANU
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Students manifest a sharp predilection for rote behaviour
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The all too familiar Indian school classroom — students chorusing a mathematical formula or an important scientific principle at the top of their voices over and over, with most of them totally oblivious to what they are “learning.”
What is more, they are made to sit through arduous sessions dedicated to such pointless yelling. This is just one instance that reflects the functioning of the country’s fault-plagued school education system.
Having spread my schooling across four Indian States (I am now an engineering student in Chennai), I found the sorry state continuing in every school I attended. Primary schools are increasingly becoming places where students manifest a sharp predilection for rote behaviour and insatiable appetites for grades and percentages.
Thanks to this method of running schools in the country, any innate thinking or creativity on the part of students is nipped in the bud.
Raise intelligent or thought-based questions in class and you get public remonstrations and a one-way ticket into the teacher’s bad books. Such proclivities are largely responsible for a lackadaisical outlook among students, who finally become devoid of independent thought. The grim situation extends across all levels of schooling.
How did such a system, imparting superficial education, come into existence in the first place? I am sure it was not a well-chalked-out plan for things to pan out the way they have. Rather, it became a situation no one could really help.
A school handling 5,000 students with vast syllabi waiting to be taught will undoubtedly fall prey to such pressure. Teachers and students succumb to this pressure alike.
With burgeoning peer pressure, all eyes (and minds) are on the high percentages that would set the scorecards ringing and not on the subjects per se.
Teachers have their own time constraints and this translates into their teaching becoming all the more examination-centric. Students find their way around exams very easily, without having to acquire the necessary lore.
Implications
The situation is all hunky-dory so long as you are schooling and the transition from school to college academics is not always flowery. Students are suddenly brought out of their reclusive and narrow intellectual shells and they start flunking even the simplest of tests in college.
Another disturbing consequence is their inability to relate what they “study” vis-À-vis real-world situations. On that count, the very principle of education seems to have been refuted. I agree that Indian doctors and engineers are among the best in the business but the fact is that we will be able to churn out better professionals in the future should things fall into place quickly.
I think it is never too late to pull back things a bit. The emphasis should be on instigating qualitative education methods and on making it more holistic in approach. We can very well afford to cut down on the quantum of curricula laid out each year. I would rather students spend an hour on callisthenics than having to memorise a few of Tennyson’s poems or two-line long algebraic formulae!
Examinations, usually cursory and awash with frenzy, could use a thorough reformulation. Possibly the only measure of academic excellence, examinations need to be contrived in a way that puts students’ true learning and thought to test. We need not put up with the system faute de mieux. Let us do what we do best — think across all dimensions without bounds and expend the full potential of the human mind. Let us also help posterity do it. The onus is on us.
(The writer is a third year Electronics and Communication Engineering student, Madras Institute of Technology. He can be reached at shivaramakrishnan.pillai@gmail.com)
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