METHOD OF EDUCATION AND THE DECLINING STANDARDS

There was a video of a child of about 6 to 7 years old doing its homework of probably class 1 or 2, under the strict admonition of its mother doing rounds in the social media for some time. The child was crying uncontrollably and and the video went viral and was viewed by not less than a 100,000 people.  The comments by many on the video were empathizing with the child and running down the mother not in the video.  

Let us go back to about five or six decades when most of us would have been in primary school as in the case of the child in the video. In the early sixties, the village panchayat school was my place of primary education.  I still remember the first teacher Kasturiranga Iyengar who made me tell the story of Dakshayani in  the class.  He was a resident of the house next to ours in the village and was privy to all my tantrums in the house.  Thanks to my great grandfather I was proficient in story telling of characters of various puranas and Ithihasas.  Till i got out of the primary school to go to the "High School" in the next village, I was using a slate board with a wooden frame and used a soft stone stick for writing on the slate. The promotion from one to another class was automatic and there was no examination except that the teacher will ask questions only instead of teaching anything on a day every month end.  As a child I never knew the importance of such questioning or writing the answers in the slate. It seems that I got good marks almost every time and it felt good.  Come to the high school, till I was in my ninth class of upper secondary stream, I never learnt Englsih seriously as I was a student of Tamil medium through and through till I graduated from the school system.  It was a funny incident when in the first hour of English in the Pre University Course, the lecturer, an Anglo Indian asked us to write a leave letter, I was struggling to find the words.  Many might have similar experiences with a new language once they had been studying in their mother tongue all along.

The method used in those days was almost similar to how the sages used to teach Veda and Upanishads to the willing and worthy students.  The teacher will tell a statement and the students have to repeat the same five or six times.  There were no home works till we reached the higher classes.  The oft repetition of the passages and writing down the lectures in the classes or copying what was written on the black board onto one's note books helped one to read and memorise easily the many lessons.  The memory power of the children increased manifold thanks to these methods.  We in the fifth standard used to recite the mathematical tables, albeit in Tamil, from 2 to 20 and from three quarter down to one-sixteenth.  This was ensured by the teacher by making us repeat the same innumerable times, first with the books and later from memory. If a boy/ girl repeats the tables without any mistake he/she was considered a pass in maths.It was a ritual everyday from 3 to 4.  No one was allowed to sit and every one was expected to stand and one after the other every student was asked to repeat the tables.  This practice stood us in good stead in higher classes when we could do mathematical sums without reference to the tables or look for unknown calculator.  This also increased the memory power manifold where we could remember many things without difficulty.

The Macaulay system of education that we had adopted during the times of British and continuing even now, foregoing the age old wisdom of our Indian way of  teaching has become the bane of many things in the education sector.  The liberal valuation, as it is adopted in the state of Tamilnadu where children score cent per cent even in languages, is another death knell. The children and the parents vie with each other to get better than the next door boy or girl.  The all-round growth which was there in the earlier times had given way to singular approach to get better marks than the neighbour's son or daughter and get into a course for getting a campus selection into an IT company.  The single point agenda of the parents driving the students to excel themselves in the subjects which they might not have chosen if given a chance is another reason for various problems associated with the students in the recent past.

The students are made to crack the exams to get exceptionally good marks, at times 1200 out of 1200 in the higher secondary examination. The teaching methodology is basically helping the students in preparing for the exams to get very good marks than understanding the subject taught.  This continues even after the wards join a college or institute of higher learning.  The main aim of the student is to excel in the final examination with good grades or GPA, so that there is no impediment in getting a campus selection in a good Indian or Multinational company, mostly in IT.  

This method of cramming the subject and repeating what one memorised in the exam without understanding anything of the subject leads to a comparison with an automobile assembly line. In this process what the students are capable of is effectively carry out what is told and not to attempt to find anything on their own.  A few institutes do make a difference but the intake is so less compared to the other institutes and colleges of higher learning, the outcome is minuscule in number.  There is no point lamenting why we had not been able to produce a Scientist of the caliber of C V Raman or his nephew Chnadrasekhar or Khorana. We were lucky that we had an APJ Abdul Kalam nurtured by the greats like Satish Dhavan to make a difference in the telemetry and rocketry. But he was from a different generation of teaching and learning. In other fields we lag behind and despite being one of the biggest market and producers of pharma products, still we have not made any drug by our own scientists which can compete with any other in the world stage.  

The climate in the institutes of higher learning is not conducive for independent research into any particular field. There are no laboratories and work benches for research in most of the institutes of higher learning.  A few may have but they do not make that big a difference in the overall.  The aim of the governments had been and continue to be mass education where by the quality suffers.  When Rajaji in his wisdom suggested education based on one's background it was ridiculed and many unwanted comments were aimed at him.  But today, we have a multitudinous crowd of young population with degrees in Engineering and Science with absolutely zilch knowledge of the subject.  The quality has suffered a lot in the aim of the successive governments to increase the numbers graduating from college.  The lucky few continue their education abroad where they learn totally different method of teaching and learning and in the process understand the subject they chose.  The unlucky majority toil in the country to find a job which has absolutely no relevance to the education they had.  A few find the easy way out of the stress of bridging the gap between their ability and the standards in some of the institutes of higher learning by resorting to drugs, suicide etc.  That is totally a different topic altogether, which warrants a separate write up.