Brandon Lyttan
Research Scholar
North Eastern Hill University
“being curious and open to a variety of thoughts, perspectives, and ideas facilitates learning and better academic performance” – R.W Lent
“when people feel curious, they are more attentive, process information at a deeper level, better retain information, and are more likely to persist on tasks until goals are met.” – Hidi M. Ainley,
Itis no secret that curiosity makes learning more effective and enjoyable. Curious students not only ask questions, but also actively seek out the answers. Without curiosity, Sir Isaac Newton would have never formulated the laws of motion, Alexander Fleming probably wouldn’t have discovered penicillin, and Marie Curie’s pioneering research on radioactivity would not exist. Many studies show that highly curious students outperform their less curious peers in the classroom and on national achievement tests. Highly curious studentsare open to the challenge of trying to integrate different ideas. However, an explicit property of curiosity is that it manifests tendencies to recognize and seek out novel and challenging experiences that inevitably lead to some degree of learning and stretching of skills and knowledge which follows G. Loewenstein’s saying,“For highly curious students, their academic motivation primarily stems from an intrinsic desire to access novel and challenging experiences and learn from them.” Deriving pleasure from making the unknown known is a route to personal growth and success.
The word curiosity, however, in our education system is often only spoken of and not practically observed,especially,among the youth in this day and age. It is very frequently observed that students sign up for higher studies with less interest or take it casually. The constant scenario of going to class and listening to what the teacher says without finding or researching about it before or after, is prevalent in this part of the world.
In a semester system, where time is one luxury we don’t have in abundance, the teachers rush to complete their courses on time before the examinations,while students are mostly left unaware and hanging in mid-air. Students usually are happy with the photocopied notes that the teachers provide as part of their lecture without venturing for additional reading and this is why we find that most students hardly remember half of the things done in the previous semester when asked about it in the next. Libraries of many institutions in our state seem like haunted houses where studentsact only as members and hardly make use of their services, which cannot even be compared with the other parts of the country, where students stay late in libraries and information centres in search of knowledge and understanding.
I used to wonder why this approach is being nurtured in our institutions when we have much more facilities of acquiring materials to learn and read in depth about any topic familiar to man. And so after a few years of observation I realisedthat the belief that we can have anything at the click of a button or a touch on the screen by using our data packs and Wi-Fi or internet facilities has intensified the complacency to read print books, as compared to students only a decade ago who had to venture from pillar to post in order to even get a single bit of information.After much pondering and reading, I alsoapprehendedthat this is not just the fault of the students, but this is a long serving practice which starts from the parents who hardly inculcate any kind of reading habit in their children. Many of the parents nowadays are so busy with their own lives and rely totally on academic institutions and private tuitions or coaching classes to help their children in different aspects of life, even in teaching them the moral lessons that should be taken care of at home.
The greatest fault here, however, alsolies with our very own education system which is basically designed to test our memory power rather than our knowledge.It only encourages students to mug up anything and everything, leading them to belief that a piece of paper we call a “mark sheet” is the only prerequisite to having a cushy job and thus ensure a quality life style. This is why we find students confining only to a particular article or book because their primary target is mostly getting high marks when it should rather be acquiring knowledge and building one’s character following what Mahatma Gandhi said, “The real difficulty is that people have no idea of what education truly is. We assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock exchange market. We want to provide only such education as would enable the student to earn more. We hardly give any thought to the improvement of the character of the educated.”
This culture of acquiring this said knowledge is awfully archaic and malignant to the welfare of the students as this will not only limit their knowledge but it will also affect the future of our nation in a negative way. This has also made it its mark on the research output ofNorth Eastern Hill University: the number of research papers ithas contributed in the past years and the number of citations reported, which are comparatively less than other universities in the North Eastern Region and mainland India, thus, affecting its rank in the National Institutional Ranking Framework of theMinistry of Human Resource Development of the nation, apart from other reasons.
But even after reading this, some may argue that this has been going on for so many years and yet we are still living a decent life. Why should we change our style of learning? Why should I be the one to start?But what we do not realise is that we have been living inside this shell for far too long that we have been blinded from the dangers that this system poses to our student life and the harm that this cancer-like disease inflicts on our knowledge. We still crave for that little knowledge that we get from following this system when we can have a lot more outside it.
It isalso evident that wedo not like to attend or participate in any academic activity organised by the institutional authorities or any other organisation insideor outside our campuses. It is such a sad thing to see a handful of students attending such programmes and yet other social activities like jam sessions or musical evenings fill the hallsmost of the time. Although it is important for us to attend such activities as well, after all we are still young and we need to enjoy our youth to the utmostextend. However, we need to remember that our objective of leaving our houses in the morning or staying far from our families and loved ones is primarily to gain knowledge and to become better people in the future.
In this struggle we as students, also need others to also join us and help us take measures in getting rid of this treacherous habit. Our teachers are the ideal partners in guiding us in the right path because I believe that teaching is one of the finest arts in shaping our minds and directing it towards positive achievements.So we ought to do away with the culture of distributing photocopied notes and start to make amends in making our classes full of life by inculcating a healthy way of learning by promoting class presentations, group discussions, open book tests and other alternative ways of learning like quizzes and dramas and skits that will not only help the students in learning more but develop their reading habits. We also need the institutional authorities to play a very important role in making sure that libraries, coaching centres and other academic facilities are well established and thatworkshops and seminars where experts in different fields are invited to talk on several topics and academic activitiesare encouraged and conducted from time to time.
Education is one of the topics that our politicians and bureaucrats talk every now and then, especially the former, when they go fishing for votes from the publicbut yet we do not see much changes in the education system. Many education policies have come and gone and yet we still thrive in the same dirt we were ages ago. I hope that the National Education Policy 2016, that was recently put forth by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, with its promises of inculcating Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) in classrooms, development of a common curriculum for subjects like mathematics science and English, promotion and reshaping of online courses, research and new knowledge, to mention a few, does not also go down the drain like the others before it. So my plea here is that we need our politicians and bureaucrats to act as implementers and practitionerswho make sure that education is imparted and received in the right manner and to not only play as law or policy makers who make education look grandeur only on paper.
Much said, the question that begs an answer here is should we just lay back and let things be the way they are? Or should we come out of shells and comfort zones to really make a change? This I leave up to you to decide, because we all know that every drop of water makes an ocean and no revolution requires a huge number to start, rather a small group of people who believe, can change the whole world, and history stands witness to this. But I do believe that this is one of the things that Rabindranath Tagore had in mind when he asked God “Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake”.