Does India Really Need its School-Coaching Center-Entrance Exam Rat Race? Some Notes for Parents, Educators, and Policy-Makers.
(Note: This is a longer version of my opinion piece published in The New Indian Express in 2018)
It should be a “teachable moment” for all of us when the Prime Minister of the second largest country in the world writes a heartfelt book to its children to help them cope with the arduous reality of their examinations.
Exam Warriors is a colorful, playful, and interactive companion for children (and parents) to learn to detach themselves from the life or death stakes associated with doing well in exams. Prime Minister Modi urges children to do some yoga, be happy (his first chapter asks children to view exams as festivals instead of tests), honest (“to cheat is to be cheap”), grateful (thank all the employees at school when you graduate not just the teachers), and detached, most of all (“exams test your current preparation, not you, so chill”).
I do not know how much relief the book, and its accompanying talks, are offering the final-exam cramming children of India, but it would perhaps be useful if the Prime Minister also lent his creative mind to the larger question increasingly set aside as technocratic minds (and commercial imperatives take over the future of education. That question, simply: is the sort of school-exam-certificate-job culture we have today the only one worth pursuing?
There are two other recent books that strike a very important note of caution against mindlessly growing the education model as it exists without questioning, creativity, and change (although the responsibility for that lies not only on the government and educators but parents too, as I discuss below).
Ganesh Devy’s The Crisis Within: Knowledge and Education offers a sharp critique of the educational boom we have witnessed in India that has largely failed to contest the traumas of casteism and colonialism. As he writes, “Unfortunately, after independence, none of the greater visions of education suitable for sustaining the innate strengths of Indian society were organically integrated with education, particularly higher education in India.” (p. 219). Instead, “The idea of producing engineers and doctors as manpower for economic development gained ground, and all secondary school education got bogged down under its crushing pressure” (p. 219)
So what we have today, and what children face year after year as it there were no other way possible at all, is a “scrutiny regime” aimed at producing economically productive, socially adjusted, and politically docile subjects. Presumably, parents are happy with this (or at least feel there is no choice), and maybe children too eventually learn to think of happiness in these narrowly proscribed ways, as a consumerist destination to be bought at the shopping mall regardless of environmental, familial, and social consequences, after they have paid their dues of memorizing and regurgitating testable facts year after year.
The question that leaves us with is a simple one, and one parents and teachers who care deeply about the young will think about: is happiness not possible along the way too, and on terms that are meaningful, inclusive, and culturally rooted?
Salman Khan’s “YouTube” academy has become a global phenomenon in self-learning, although its importance and potential is often subsumed within an adulatory language about the utopian nature of digital technology rather than the vision, and possibility for alternative thinking and living it contains. In his book, The One World Schoolhouse, Khan talks not only about his personal experiences tutoring a family member that led to his questioning of the way we teach our children, but of the historic and political origins of the school-system as we know it in the world today and we blindly follow as a sign of modernity and “progress.”
Although he writes about the American system, parents and educators in India are also familiar with the “Prussian model” we all follow today. We break up children unnaturally into age cohorts, we fragment and compartmentalize their learning experience into subjects and periods, and of course, we test them not for “mastery learning” (which would require an individualized pace of study to ensure all concepts are mastered before moving on) but for a mere pass mark that lets them move into the next year. He calls this a “broken model.” Maybe it was slightly good in Prussia in the early days of the industrial revolution when it spread egalitarianism, but not useful at all in terms of nurturing space for creative, diversity, and happiness. Prussian schools, whether in America or India, are aimed at producing obedience, workers and soldiers in the old days, and employees and consumers now; not really human beings, as it were.
Khan urges us to note that we are in a “once in a millennium turning point” where we have an opportunity to replace mass education with “active processing,” to change a system where students, overwhelmed with fragmentation, repetition, boredom, and a “dumbed down popular culture,” simply forget much of what they supposedly learn.
In any case, as he reminds us, 65% of future jobs have not even been invented. In other words, we have no idea if the engineering/management rat-race into which many parents push their children today will turn out to be sustainable when they grow up either. What is important is not “what they learn,” but “how they learn to teach themselves” in a future that is not yet clearly imaginable to us beyond signs that the air, water, lands and trees will all be in far worse shape than even what they are now, among other things.
I draw our attention to the ecological dimension of the future rather than the usual jobs and skills dimension because there is perhaps no other grand idea that needs to be worked on by parents, teachers, governments and the world as a whole.
“Development” in economic terms through engineering might have been a fair goal for the first generation that grew up after India’s independence, but it cannot be the reigning ideal for the much-talked-about cohort of India’s children born after liberalization. The sheer ecological footprint of their entry into a consumer culture, which is what they are being herded into in our present system, is something that we must teach them about. They have to be reminded they are going to have to function when they grow up as nothing less than a catastrophe-averting generation (and naturally, set the everyday examples we must for them to follow).
Unfortunately, despite having a Prime Minister who commendably concerns himself with “small is beautiful” problems like the exam-stresses of children, we seem to lack a stronger sense of cultural and political leadership as far as “small is beautiful” solutions go. As someone who teaches for a living, I believe that we need a serious change in the trajectory of education, and how we think about it too. One direction rooted in our own past is discussed by Devy. Rather than think about education as a mere tool for “getting ahead” (not only for survival but increasingly for aspirational and consumerist status signaling), we might rediscover for ourselves the presence and value of consciousness itself as the field, purpose, and destination of education. Devy talks about the ideals of education that Gandhi, Aurobindo and Tagore had. A goal of “cheto vistar,” of education as “aesthetic and spiritual ascension,” anchored reflexively to the ground of real-world social inequities as urged on by Ambedkar and others, will make decolonization a reality not only for the seemingly interminably (and ecologically expensively) being built nation, but also for the mothers, fathers, and children, most of all, who constitute it.
