The earliest questions that a child asks are about nature and life – why does the sun rise in the morning and go down at night? Why does the moon change shape? Where do the stars go during the day? Why do birds fly? Why can’t I fly? Where did I come from? The questions are endless, and they will keep coming if they are answered, instead of being shut off. Some questions are simple, some are profound, some perplexing, some that appear silly to adults, but all of them are equally important to the child. Unfortunately, the natural curiosity in children is often killed by adults, who ask them to stop asking questions or give them answers that dampen, rather than inflame their curiosity. The worst answer that a child can be given is “it is the way it is, you will understand when you grow up”. We force children to “grow up” and become boring adults, instead of nurturing their curiosity and letting them bloom.
In the traditional family system of the past, children could take their questions to grandparents who were less busy with chores than the parents, or to younger and more enthusiastic relatives like aunts, uncles, cousins. Having grown up in a typical joint family, I cherish the stories narrated by my grandfather, the time I spent cuddling with my grandmother and picking up life skills from her, the endless silly games with my uncles and the many hours we cousins spent playing, gossiping, fighting, and getting messy, away from the watchful eyes of parents, in family gatherings. In the nuclear families of today, the child only has her parents, and sometimes, a sibling to interact with. The parents are often too busy with their lives and the children are left to the care of attendants, babysitters, governesses. In the middle to upper-middle class families of today, the children are pampered with gifts, luxuries, vacations, but rarely with attention and quality time spent reading or playing games or story-telling. In school, they are prepared for the race for success from a very early stage. In India, I see children beginning to prepare for competitive exams and Olympiads at the age of thirteen, when they are still in middle school. High school students rush from one tutorial to another, often skipping regular school, to prepare for the various competitive exams. Some are of course packed off to the little town of Kota, where prisons await them with rigorous study regimes and jailers in the form of teachers and tutors. Many of these prisoners succeed in securing a seat in one of the prestigious institutions, but some give up and crack under the whip of training – young lives lost to the race for success.
In schools, the biggest enemy of curiosity is the syllabus. Every teacher is rushing to complete the syllabus which is not just a list of topics to be covered in a school year, but has set timelines and targets to be reached in a quarter, a month, a week, depending on the school and the board of study. Teachers are more like clerks, filling in forms and registers, keeping tab on the progress of each student, grading them according to set rubrics and striving to have classes full of students who are all great performers. Students cannot get poor grades, they must not fail, they cannot be ranked based on performance. All of this has good intent behind the regulations, but does that help? In suppressing the natural competitiveness in growing humans, do we not curb their desire to do better? In normalizing grades and forcing everyone to go up the ladder, instead of taking their time at a level, do we not weaken some of them? What is the purpose of examinations that do not give real assessment of an examinee’s capabilities? Why do we lay so much emphasis on grades and performance by certain metrics? A child who simply cannot handle mathematics might be blossoming as a musician or footballer. A child who simple can’t paint might be a good storyteller. A child who hates history might be a budding chef. Why do we not celebrate the diversity in children, nurture their skills and encourage their passions, and let them grow in their unique ways? Why do we still try to emulate the “one size fits all” methods of teaching when we know it doesn’t work?
The New Education Policy (NEP) in India was launched with much pomp and show, and is being implemented across the board with much enthusiasm, without a thought to the real outcome. The idea that went into drawing up the policy was wonderful, especially considering school education. The broad framework is to allow for flexibility, hands-on experience, curiosity-driven learning and group learning, especially at the primary and pre-primary levels. Just imagine, if you could go to school and simply play with friends and learn through the process! Imagine children asking questions and being told stories in response, through which they learn history. Imagine exploring the school garden to learn biology. In the ideal world, this is how education should be for children. Unfortunately, our system has taken the NEP and turned it around to create more rules, structures, and methods of assessment, creating more clerical work for the teachers and making the process of learning no more interesting for the students. The process of continuous assessment is now broken down into points that are accumulated from reports, files, notebook submissions, oral assessment, etc, and no reduction in examination stress. In an ideal world, the process of implementing the NEP should have started with extensive training for the educators, not just in methods, but in the philosophy of teaching. Then the earliest level of students should have been exposed to the new methods of learning, so that they would have grown with the system. Instead, we have learners at all levels being dumped into the system, struggling to cope and teachers at all levels struggling to remain afloat.
In a country that lays so much stress on the glory of the past, I am surprised that we don’t make an attempt to learn from some of the really good examples of pedagogy. While I am not a fan of the Gurukul system in which the Guru knows all and is to be worshipped, I admire the idea of debates where the learners could ask questions and enter into a dialogue with the teacher and a discourse emerged. I have always found the Panchatantra a great source of entertainment and knowledge, and strongly feel that teachers could emulate Vishnu Sharma in using animals as characters in stories, because children relate well to them. I have myself tried this with my children when they were growing up, creating stories with animal characters, with a touch of fantasy but a lot of reality and no deviation from biology, other than the animals “talking”. My children, who are now teenagers, still remember those stories fondly. Each story had a life lesson in it, which they can now understand better. Isn’t that what learning should be – maturing with age and giving different perspectives at different phases of one’s life?
Why am I rambling about pedagogy, learning and stories? Because every time I teach a fresh batch of undergraduates, I feel frustrated, at their reluctance to ask questions, to engage in discussions, to think and reason. I feel frustrated when I see students spewing jargon as a demonstration of knowledge acquired, instead of allowing the group to delve in and discover the answer. I feel angry to see that these bright young minds have been stuffed full with information leading to correct answers, but have not been given the freedom to think and imagine and be creative. I feel sad, when an assignment asking them to write a story is looked down upon, because it is not “scientific” enough and does not have any perfect answer that will fetch full marks. I feel disappointed to see that in one of the best institutions of the country, there are only a few students who really care about knowledge and the journey, and everyone is obsessed with the end goal of high grades, internships in foreign universities, and the typical measures of success that are not necessarily the best indicators of one’s development as a person.
We need bright students passionate about teaching to become school teachers. Only then, we can create a pool of learners who are interested in the process of learning. However, in our country, school teachers are paid the least, and a career in primary school teaching is considered to be the last option for a bright young person. If one has a Master’s or higher degree, they can consider teaching in high schools or colleges, but primary schools are never their first choice. However, it is the teacher in the primary school who shapes a child’s personality and trajectory of learning the most. They train the largest number of our future citizens, and do the greatest of services to society. If we need to really change our education system, we should begin at the beginning and make a career is school teaching a lucrative option for bright and ambitious students. However, in a country where government funding for education is considered good at 2.9% of the GDP, including education at all levels, can we even dream for such a time? In a country, which is ranked among the top five in the world for children dropping out of school in the primary level, can we even begin to discuss learning and knowledge?
Several NGOs and other organizations are working continuously to improve the education scene in India. However, we still need to do more. We need more government initiative, more schools, more teachers, more educational material that is easy to access and does not promote rote learning. We need more and more private funders to pool in their resources and pitch in to serve society. After all, we are the youngest country in the world, by the average age of our population, and we have the power of the youth. But we need to ensure that the youth of today are strong people of tomorrow, with good reasoning capabilities, creative thought and disruptive ideas that can help the world to survive and revive from the damages of the past and present wrought by humanity. A sustainable earth needs better earthlings than the ones we produce through our current system of education. But, is anyone listening?
kathaykathay 