Recently, I happened to meet the principal of one of the international schools in the capital and she told me an interesting story. She told me about a student, all of 11, who had moved from the ICSE system to their school recently. When she asked him what he thought the difference between the two schools was, he said that in this school they kept asking him to think - something he had never done before. To quote her: "This school is very tough. Everyone keeps asking me to think; in my old school, we never had to think."
Lord Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade - "theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die" - in a nutshell sums up the story of the Indian education system, the syllabus, curriculum and pedagogy. Things are just shoved down your throat and at some point you are expected to produce what you ingested on paper, verbatim preferably. There's very little room for any original thinking.
Take for instance Jawaharlal Nehru and his philosophy and vision for India. There may be many today who argue that Nehru's vision for India's future and his suggested path were not perhaps the ideal way to go but take a look at any Indian textbook - history, civics or political science - and it tells you how wonderful Nehru was both as a human being and as a visionary. I don't want to get into whether this was so or not but I don't understand how this can be insisted upon as a given. Inform the student of how Nehru thought, his contributions and his vision and let him judge for himself.
The same holds true for Mahatma Gandhi. Again at no point through one's Indian education can one "critically" examine Gandhi. That he was great is simply a given. But listen for a while to what B R Ambedkar had to say about the Mahatma and you may have a slightly different opinion.
Conversely, while almost everyone will argue that Adolf Hitler was not the best thing that happened to Germany and the world for that matter, the international school system, and some of the boards that I have come across, do allow students to examine Hitler and his strengths and weaknesses with an objective lens. You are free to pronounce him a gifted orator or a charismatic leader (both of which he undeniably was) even as you deride his actions.
The point that I am trying to make is that human beings are fallible even when they are eulogised to the point of worship and even those who are demonised can have redeeming characteristics. There is always scope for argument and the education system ought to let you to make judgments and then judge you on the basis of the strength of your arguments - whichever way you choose to argue.
A second problem with the Indian system is that it judges students based on their memory power above all else. Subjects like history are rendered meaningless by the way they are taught and delivered - dates have to be memorised and produced without any logic at all. You learn when which king ruled and for how long and occasionally what he built during his lifetime and little else. You skim the surface of several decades without going into any specific period in any depth. As a result, most Indian history students will have a mumbo jumbo of facts about kings, dynasties and events in the past without connecting any dots or ever examining the link between various developments.
Third, experimentation of any kind is actively frowned upon. A nephew of mine scored 94 out of 100 in English literature recently. When I asked him how this was possible, he said that they are required to produce key words in a character sketch. As long as the key words are present, full marks are awarded. But synonyms of key words will make you lose marks. So, you not only have to produce what you are told, you have to produce it ditto. There is no room for original expression.
I am not saying that the international systems have all the answers. There is no reason for us to simply emulate what other countries may be doing. But we definitely need to start thinking about changing the way we deliver education and what our goals are, and design a board and curriculum suited to our own needs. We need to excite, build curiosity and challenge young minds not numb them with dull matter and stuff them with trivia.
anjuli.bhargava@gmail.com
