The Confusion That is Education

India is a land of educationists !! From anyone who gets his/her child admitted to the nursery class, through the tiers of babudom that control the levers of education, to those who manage to find places on committees and commissions, there is no shortage of those who feel that they have the necessary expertise to expound of all matters of pedagogy and instruction. In the midst of this cacophony the diffident and hesitant voice of the Educator is drowned out. The present state of our education system can well be likened to a vehicle being driven by one who is half-crazed by the noise of contradictory instructions being shouted by a host of back-seat instructors. To add to the confusion, one detects a new found interest in education driven by market concerns, which has all along been a low priority area in our national scheme of things. There is the desire to rev up the engine to make it go faster, equip it with new gadgets, improve the upholstery – all of which will surely make for a better ride but for the fact that we do not appear to have a clue as to where we are going. If much of our present day education is seen as irrelevant, if it shields students from reality, if it educates for obsolescence, if it does not develop intelligence, if it induces alienation, if it punishes creativity and independence, if the system fails to realize that the one fundamental characteristic of the world we live in is a constant ever accelerating rate of change, then surely it is not too farfetched to say that something needs to be done and done soon.

In a conference of School Principals at Shimla I had suggested that many of our present difficulties arise from the fact that there is a lack of adequate interface between the senior secondary and tertiary levels of education. Therefore very often the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, resulting in situations that are detrimental to proper academic functioning. To give an example: one major postgraduate thrust is towards management courses where the IIMs attract the best students. To enter into an IIM one has to qualify the Common Admissions Test, the CAT. The eligibility for sitting for CAT is a mere 50% in graduation. The result is that instead of trying to excel at the graduating examination, good students consider it a waste of time to dwell on their course work in college and would rather spend all the time programming themselves to qualify the CAT. Consequently, not only is course work in colleges gravely compromised and even trivialized, but even those who do make it to the IIMs have serious deficiencies in the basic understanding of their subject. I believe a similar situation exists at the Class 12 level where the skills required for gaining admission into the IITs, and many medical and engineering colleges are quite different from the skills required for doing well in the class 12 examinations. The class 12 examinations, therefore, acquire for such students a more or less cosmetic value. In fact it is commonly felt that the two are in an either/or situation. Either one can do well in the class 12 examination or one can pass the entrance examination for admission to a professional college. Unfortunately there appears to be no forum where such concerns can be voiced.

At a more fundamental level there is no mechanism to address some basic issues about what constitutes good education and what place such constituents could have in our appraisal systems. While there may be indices (however unsatisfactory) to determine the literacy levels that a candidate has attained, there appears to be no mechanism for indicating the educational attainments of a student in terms of the core values that any reasonable educated person is expected to have. Fundamental tools of education like basic problem solving, responsiveness to universal human values, appreciation of responsibility, peer relationships, sense of discrimination and discernment, and other such intangibles, must find some place in our evaluative processes. However we do not appear to have a clue as to how this can be brought about.

It is well-known that public confidence in our evaluative processes is under a strain. Measures like re-checking have been introduced by certain Boards to restore confidence in our processes and to have corrective mechanisms in case of discrepancies. These have not proved adequate enough and a move is afoot to bring in more transparency by showing the answer scripts to the examinees. This may be helpful but somehwere along the line one suspects that such a cure may prove worse than the disease if only because we are not addressing the fundamental issue at stake. The fundamental issue is a lack of confidence in our system and our teachers. It is this issue that needs to be addressed and a mere tinkering with the mechanics of evaluation will not solve he problem. We need to initiate a process to instill a sense of trust and confidence in our pedagogical systems and then our evaluators and our institutions. We do not have any mechanism to deal with such matters other than getting into an oppressive programme of rules and regulations that have the net result of mutilating the very spirit and import of true education.

The issues I have briefly touched upon are merely indicative of the enormity of the task that confronts us and the lack of any viable mechanism to deal with them in a manner that is germane to educational (and not merely bureaucratic or academic) modes of thinking. There are a host of other issues like the rigidity and inflexibility of our academic programmes so that once a student in caught in the straitjacket of one discipline s/he finds it extremely difficult and cumbersome to make a transition to another discipline; the compulsive-obsessive post-school/college admission syndrome that has resulted in a phenomenon where all our pedagogical efforts are concentrated on programming a student to score high marks without relevance to his/her competency in basic literacy skills so that we end up with products who are neither sufficiently literately or adequately educated; the growing sense of dissatisfaction with class 12 marks as being the sole indicators of merit combined with a lack of any acceptable understanding of what constitutes “merit” due to the fact that the wide ranging social and economic disparities in our country militate against any simplistic connotations of the term ‘merit’; the highly unsatisfactory appraisal systems where the effects of twelve years of schooling are tested through an illogical and highly unscientific programme of a hot-house, anxiety-ridden, three-hour examination; the lack of any viable method to level out the disparities in the standards and marking systems of various Boards and examining bodies conducting the same examination; the rights of institutions to have their own space untrammeled by bureaucratic or judicial gymnastics, etc etc..

Viable responses to such issues have to be found by Educators and not left to Academic or Bureaucratic members of the educational establishment. The fact that so far no effective headway has been made in addressing such concerns is because they have been looked at through the bureaucratic lens or the academic eye. Hence there is a surfeit of rules and regulations. Similarly, the disproportionate emphasis on an ‘Academic’ approach has effectively curbed the Educator’s point of view at looking at issues. As the ‘Educator’ has taken a backseat to the ‘Academic’ therefore we have the inordinate emphasis on acquiring skills and information with the corresponding inability to find measures to translate these skills and information into knowledge and wisdom. Whereas an Academic is by definition confined to courses of study and the mechanics of completing the syllabus, the Educator, while being mindful of the same, also seeks to make significant intervention in the lives of his/her students. To put it in another way: the academic’s concern is with covering the syllabus while the educator’s desire is to uncover it.

Thus the point I am trying to make is that issues that plague education today and having been festering for some time now, need the attention of Educators. In order to do this the first requirement is that Educators discover a Voice that will effectively articulate our growing concerns. In the beginning it may well be a voice in the wilderness but with persistence and the genuineness of concern, this voice will, I have no doubt, acquire a resonance of its own.
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