Is Today’s Education System Just A Bunch Of People Lost At Sea?

Madhulika V Narasimhan, countercurrents.org, 21 April, 2014: My teacher once asked a question (that left us all thinking hard for the ‘correct’/ ‘intelligent’ answer) to everyone present in class: “Why do we go to school?” There were all sorts of hesitant hands going up and giving answers such as- “to earn money”, “because our parents wanted us to”, “because everybody does!”, “because otherwise the society won’t respect us”, “to learn about things” and so on. 

To begin with, not everybody lands a job these days, and there are tonnes of other things that our parents, peers and the good old society want us to do. So we narrow down to the ‘learning’ bit. How many of us do remember what we learn in school? Of course apart from the alphabet, adding up to three digit numbers beyond which we start hunting for the calculator ‘app’ on our phones, and things like what stupid things random people did in high school.

Nobody stops to think about why education in school is just another rite de passage, lacking in any intellectual stimulation? Perhaps not. Who really cares about what they learned, or whether or not any of it is useful in life so long as the family gets to brag about how their kid got a ninety seven point eight percent, point five percent more than the neighbour’s kid. Education today has become completely objective, all about grades, numbers and competition. In schools today one is taught objective facts, given notes to cram the night before the test or during the endless tutorials and remedial classes and tuitions (all of them together!), only to be forgotten with the first step taken outside the examination hall. What is the point of learning facts in isolation, without encouraging students to look at them critically in the contexts which underlie them? Why is it that they have to memorize paragraphs out of textbooks, to be reproduced word-by-word, instead of enabling a personal understanding in a less complex manner?

The problem probably lies with the educational boards. It won’t be quite as surprising if one looks at the processes of teacher selection, especially at the university level. An example being that of the National Eligibility Test. A number of questions seem ridiculous enough to make one laugh at the stupidity of it all and the regressive minds behind the questions (pardon my disrespect towards the seemingly intelligent ones setting the questions). Some of the examples for your perusal-

Which one of the following is the best method of teaching: Lecture, Discussion, Demonstration or Question-Answer? Or, what would you do if the students make a lot of noise in class: Walk out, wait for them to stop talking, shout at them, or punish them? Or, why should the majority of teachers at the primary level of school be women? The answers to the first two questions could depend on various factors including the size of the class, the relationship with students and the theme of the class. As for the last example, well, yes females are all born to love children and handle their antics and know why they are crying and have the patience to deal with all of them at once.

How can someone’s knowledge, especially in fields such as sociology, history or psychology be judged on the basis of such absurd multiple choice questions? Educational institutions are an extremely important part of an individual’s life, where the education must create thinking, critical and keen minds instead of clones that are all expected to know everything under the sun, and have the exact same interests and abilities in learning.

We need to take a step back and think for a moment, if we want to raise a generation of Yes Men. They are a multitude of youngsters who can mug copious notes and spew them at a moment’s notice, but fail to make even one cogent, coherent argument when asked a serious question. And we need to ask if choosing their educators can really be fairly done by judging candidates on the basis of an MCQ, especially when the Q’s are so Moronic and Crass.

Madhulika V Narasimhan has done Bachelor and Master in Sociology, and have written fortnightly columns on various subjects for the Delhi edition of DNA.