Mending the education system

Now that Bill Gates has said it, here's where we must start

I don’t know if any of you noticed but the Microsoft co-founder spoke up on India’s education system and how it was broken a few weeks ago. All these years Indians of all hues, shapes and sizes saying the same thing may have had little impact but now that Bill Gates has finally said it, it acquires a new significance and may even be acted upon.

In the last three years, I have been meeting school principals and headmasters, educationists, academics, teachers and the like. And here’s a short summary of what I’d like to see the government begin to do.

Do away with the existing school boards. Abolish ICSE and CBSE and start from scratch. Let’s design at least two-three brand new boards (the UK, which is the size of Uttar Pradesh, has a host of boards for students to choose from) with content relevant to today’s world. A student in Alwar or Gorakhpur may not need to be fed the same content as one in Ahmedabad and Gurugram.

In general, the focus should be on thinking instead of rote learning. Let’s stop boring students to death. If the bureaucracy is not up to to the task, involve people from outside. There is a profusion of individual-led initiatives that have plunged into trying to solve India’s education woes after they have realised the extent of the crisis. Central Square Foundation, Katha Lab School, Indus Action, foreign NGOs like ARK and The Education Alliance — the list is long. Let them do the needful.

Scrap the pointless B.Ed degree. This useless piece of paper can be bought in almost any city for a few thousand rupees. Allow schools to find real teachers — people passionate about teaching. More than one principal and headmaster has said that there is no correlation between good teaching and the possession of a degree today.

Focus once again on the old forgotten things called books. This holds as true for teachers as children: both need to relearn how to read. Yes, I am talking about regular paper books. Just old-fashioned classics that had a message to impart. Charles Dickens, Harper Lee, Emily Bronte, George Bernard Shaw and Somerset Maugham may sound terribly jaded and dull but they served a certain purpose. It can’t be all fantasy, dragons and Harry Potter. Even though it may not always appear so, the world is real. The values, beliefs, and moral and other codes taught by the classics subtly but firmly are often missing in this new and — to me rather alien — genre of fantasy.

Use films intelligently to drive home a point, chronicle an event and bring alive history and movements like genocide. The Levelfield School — that I came across and wrote about recently in this paper — in West Bengal’s Suri has done just that. A delightful mix of films — the class-wise list is both invigorating and exciting even for me — is used to introduce new thoughts, ideas, concepts and understanding of events of the past. Class 7 students have watched, grasped, discussed and imbibed lessons from films like Hotel Rwanda, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, The Gathering Storm, Stalin (1992) and Judgment at Nuremberg. By the time the students are heading into high school, they have been exposed to The Godfather, Talvar, 13 Conversations About One Thing, Maria Full of Grace, Into the Wild, Monsoon Wedding, Shawshank Redemption and The Lives of Others, among a host of others. Most of the films have something concrete to say, a message to impart. They are not all slick, smart and empty as a lot of the stuff today tends to be. The promoter of the school — a 33-year-old — says he allows and encourages them to think, argue, question and debate the films at length. The students are actually wide awake through classes! I don’t know about you but having slept through classes for years in school (and college), this sounds like a novel and appealing idea to me.

But above all, we need to work together to rebuild the trust and respect between teacher and pupil. A bit like doctors and patients, there’s been some kind of inversion of the relationship between students and teachers. More than one senior teacher tells me that most teachers — under pressure from the school and management — tread on eggshells and shy away from serious disciplining even when it is the need of the hour. Why should students be allowed to display disregard towards their teachers as is often the case in the urban private school system? Parents cannot get away by treating education and learning as a commodity bought and sold in the market. It isn’t a common good governed by demand, supply and a price.