It was January 2000. I received my class 10 preliminary exam results.
Vividly remember getting 71 marks out of 100 in science. My teacher was very disappointed.
She said –“Kathan, you don’t cover all points in your responses. Also, you
write very slow and don’t finish exam within time-limits. You need a lot of
writing practice”.
I learnt an important lesson. Simply understanding the content was not
sufficient. If I wanted to score high, I needed to memorize each and every point
mentioned in the textbook and reproduce the text in my answer-sheet without
spending time on thinking. I practiced just that for the following two month.
As a result, I scored 98% in Science in the Board exams.
·
preparing model responses for all possible questions
across subject content
·
practicing reproduction of available “model” responses
through repeatedly reading and/or writing
A lot of policymakers/educators and people who “think they are
educationists” label this learning approach as “Rote-Learning” and blame
students and teachers. I would like to clarify that memorization is not
necessarily rote-learning, but memorization without conceptual understanding is
rote-learning. Nonetheless, the blame game is widely prevalent within policy
circles and in media and the broader context is ignored. In this piece, I discuss the educational ecology that encourages
memorization.
Assessment Practices
With exceptions of some of the elite K-12 schools and premier higher
education institutions (e.g., IITs, IIMs), educational assessment in-general is
based on the questions listed in the textbooks, previous exam papers (available to students) and/or practice-books at all levels
(from primary to university-level). Even the state administered board
examinations that are of extremely high stake follow the same trend. (Read: Unscientific
assessment practices of Educational Boards) Note that the 12th
standard board exam result serves as a criterion (in most cases, a sole
criterion) for the choice of career as well as admission to the higher
education institution. These exams focus excessively on knowledge and
understanding levels of cognition (as per Bloom’s Taxonomy). The students
rarely see test items that measure higher levels of cognition (i.e.,
application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) and get opportunity to exhibit
their in-depth learning. Overall, key to academic success is reproduction of “model”
responses (or textbook responses) in timely manner. Now, you see why students
practice reproduction of model responses.
Before discussing what teachers do, it is important to
understand the context in which they function. For this, let us see the
administrative setup.
State-Administrators: Educational
policy is mainly a state-level issue. Undisputedly, India’s state administrative
setup is highly centralized and extremely hierarchical. On a side note, the Chinese system is much more decentralized. The state administrators decide and
allocate resources to all public schools. States micro-manage, for example:
hire/fire school staff, develop annual-activity calendars for schools, design
curriculum, print textbooks, teaching tools, administer board exams, and
conduct professional development programmes. Of course, this is extremely
burdensome for the state-level officers, but the system has been like this
since Nehru’s time and there has been no public debate on decentralization and
capacity building at lower administrative-levels. If you observe the
functioning of these state-administrators, you get a feeling that India
basically has only one school per state with classes spread across that entire
state.
District/Block/Cluster
Administrators
Accordingly, the district/block/cluster level administers function as
eyes and hands of the state. They have very little autonomy, and are there to execute
state-orders and monitor all schools within their purview.
Principal
The principal is basically a teacher with additional administrative
duties like: taking responsibility of financial accounts and resource inventories,
supervising teachers, keeping up with all state mandated year-round activities
and submitting an incredible amount of paper work routinely, attending meetings
whenever the higher authorities call on (meetings may be called on the same day
and one is expected to be present). But, s/he does not have much say in teacher
recruitment, or acquiring funding or resources.
Teachers
Teachers may or may not face problems on personal level, but this
profession has been the biggest loser in India’s rapid educational-infrastructural
expansion. Some of the big challenges include: Extremely poor pre-service and
in-service training, harsh working condition (close to 30-40 hours of lecturing
per week with average class-size of 40), little access to teaching aids, and no
time allocation for lesson planning, test development, or homework assessment. Average
entry-level pay can be 10-15 times lesser for teachers than that for engineers.
Note that there is no tenure-track and hardly any pipeline leading to professional
growth. Teacher can at the most be a principal if luck favours (but that may
not have any monetary benefit). No reward/recognition for good teaching, and
pay increases are solely based on seniority.
In this educational hierarchy,
teachers are at the very bottom. Bossism is very explicit and people at higher
level of administration display their power unapologetically. I have seen
principals sit on the floor while the state administrators sit at a dais and
get an emperor like treatment. It’s difficult to imagine a government school
teacher arguing on a policy issue with the state-administrators. The entire
social context is set up to make teachers feel they are subservient to all
higher-level administers. Accordingly, instead of catering to the students,
teachers’ cater to the principal and the administrators at the level above. In
fact, the entire machinery caters to people at the level above and exercises power
to shut down voices coming from below. The IASs often do the same. They cater
to their political masters and shut off any complaints coming from levels
below.
In this tradition of
catering to the bosses amid demoralizing social context, teachers do what it
takes to keep things going. The dutiful ones cover their syllabus. It should be
noted that the Indian curricula across various educational boards cover
incredible breadth of subject content. To give an illustration, things that I
studied in 8th grade physics (e.g., Newtonian
Mechanics) are taught at the undergraduate-level in the US. The only way this
great breadth of curriculum can be covered is through the use of lecture
method. Ideally, a teacher would be able to spend some time introducing a concept
and then demonstrate solutions for some textbook questions before moving on to
new content. There is little time for experimentation or critical classroom
discussions and to go in-depth of the subject. And let’s not forget, the exams
do not care for depth. It is very common for teachers to ask students to write
responses for the textbook questions more than once for homework.
Parents
Parents in-general are concerned about the results and not the process. Unfortunately, the
social context is set up where memorization is considered as a sign of being genius.
I have an untested hypothesis that children whose parents are more involved
with their studies memorize more content.
Private Tutoring
The prime purpose of private tutoring is to get access to model
responses and to drill and practice more memorization. It is very common for
the tutors to share their own version of “model” responses with their students.
Today as I look back to
my 10th standard board exam preparation, I wonder what if the exams
had significant amount of test items at application level. I spent more than two months
almost memorizing the entire textbook. What if I had spent that time designing
some experiments, visiting museums, reading popular science magazines or
watching sci-fi movies? I had this sort of question on my board exam:
What is Environmental Degradation? Mention the measures to control
Environmental Degradation. (5 marks)
One definition and all eight points on ‘Measures
to control Environmental Degradation’ mentioned in the textbook. Of course, I
nailed it. But, what if I was asked the following question (which had no readily available model response):
Based on your knowledge of the science textbook, prepare a detailed plan
of action to cope up with the Environmental Degradation in your home
town/village/city. (5 marks)
What if we prepare a social context where
students need to tap into their deeper levels of learning? This cannot happen
overnight. It is a gradual process: increasing weightage of application level questions on exams,
high quality teachers who are as professionally competent and as well-paid as
any engineer, doctor, or scientist on average, more experimentation and higher order discussions
in classrooms, entire administrative structure which caters to the students and
not the bosses, and….
[Note: This piece sheds light on common
patterns. There are always exceptions. A lot of administrators, principals, teachers
and parents are putting incredible amount of efforts keeping the students at the
centre; and there’s always a Rancho in every classroom.]
I welcome your comments.