By Patricia Mukhim
One of the first things our education system does is to discipline kids to the point where they become human automatons. In most educational institutions kids are not encouraged to ask questions. Teaching is a top-down process where the teacher is always right; hence kids accept the teachers’ words as Gospel. Any child that dares ask questions would be put in his/her place and be called an impudent brat. This is the education system that most of us survived. Have things changed today? Maybe in the elite schools hopefully but not in the rural outback where school continues to be a boring, non-creative space and where kids are put through an unimaginative learning regime. No wonder most kids find school so boring and the world outside it enchantingly engaging and interactive.
To develop social skills, the classroom must be interactive so that even the most shy and introverted child can come out of her shell. All that the teacher needs to do is to kickstart a conversation on an issue and let the class play around with their own ideas and come up with several different answers. We know by now that the method of rewarding only one correct answer may not be the best thing in learning. Kids thrive when the classroom can be divided into a story corner with different corners telling their own short stories. Children love games where there is no right or wrong, win or lose. It makes them feel happy and included.
One of the other things that does not happen in most schools is the parent-teacher interface. Parents have a right to ask questions on how their children are learning and if there is anything they ought to do to help the child. But in our schools, parents hardly interact with the teachers. In rural areas teachers are told by parents, “if the child doesn’t behave, beat him/her into obedience.” Perhaps parents actually lack parenting skills. How would a woman becoming a mother at 15-16 years of age and then having another child at 18 years, another at 20 years and so on have the time and inclination to bring up the children as they should, in a climate of acceptance and a surrounding that exudes love. In most households, parents fight in front of their kids and fathers can also get violent. Think of the fear and trepidation in the small little guileless kids. What an atmosphere to grow up in! Yet that’s a reality in several households where the father comes home drunk.
Education must factor in all these social problems and teachers today have to don the role of mentor and counsellor. Hence child psychology is an important subject but so is counselling psychology which was not part of the Teachers’ Training curriculum. Today teaching is no longer a top-down activity. For the urban student everything is available on the internet. School books lack learning diversity and therefore fail to challenge the students who might think differently. If our education system had been robust and encouraged questioning and criticism and empowered students with communication skills, would we have had such a tame population that would remain silent in the face of assaults on the founding principles of democracy?
But perhaps India was never a full-fledged democracy. Just a quarter of a century after independence the first blow was struck when the Emergency was imposed. Thankfully at the time there were many who stood up against this diktat and several independent-minded persons even went to jail for believing in free speech. Now there don’t seem to be too many who want to question and challenge the system. So is our school curriculum also tailored in a manner where questioning is equal to impertinence? Is this model of education shaping the thinking of our students such that they accept everything unquestioningly? Is such an education system good for democracy?
But that aside, with the implementation of the much-touted New Education Policy (NEP) which is being seen as a revolution in education, will anything change if the teaching community is not retrained, and retrofitted to deal with a challenging curriculum that includes a lot of ‘learning by doing?’ We are unsure if the NEP is based on robust research about the failure of the existing education system and where those failures lie and are being remedied or if it is just a sudden rush of adrenaline among a set of educational researchers and stalwarts that are hell bent on changing historical facts and inserting others that are in line with a certain political ideology. Certain facts of history have their place in the scheme of things although they may not be so important beyond a point. The way we were schooled to memorize dates of wars and battles now seems so pointless. Yet we were told by our History teachers in college that dates are to be written and placed on a wall where our eyes are most likely to fall day in and day out so that those dates stuck to our memories and those dates were what fetched us marks. How important are those dates today in our day to day lives?
The problem with education today and in the past too is that of teachers as much as it is of students and parents. Once a teacher is employed she (she here is gender inclusive) is never assessed as to whether she is really able to communicate and has the grace to work with the weakest in the class; to work with a slow learner without losing her cool. It takes a lot to do that and the problem really is that we have so few who have the passion to be with children and guide them such that they learn to live their lives well and not just score good marks. But if schools started assessing teachers particularly in the rural areas the problem would be that there will be schools without teachers. Most individuals who join the teaching profession do so as a last resort when they are unable to get any other job. The results are there for us to see each time the SSLC results are out. Schools in rural Meghalaya, particularly in Garo Hills continue to perform abysmally with zero percentage pass in the SSLC exams. Why should this be so? What sort of remedial teaching is being given to students? Why are parents of these students not able to hold the schools accountable? What’s the point of sending a child to school for 12 or more years when they don’t learn anything at the end of it all and can’t even score pass marks in their SSLC and that when the standards have been lowered such that failing in Mathematics allows a child to pass? In the first place lowering standards to enable kids to pass is a bad idea. Improving teaching methods should have been the remedy.
In Meghalaya today the literacy rate is 74.43 % which means that a substantial 25% of people are still illiterate. But literacy means nothing. Education is everything because it is assumed that an educated person has a reasonably good chance of being able to reason out and be critical of the governance system, of institutions, of lapses in society etc. Also an educated person is expected to be more aware of issues that afflict society and to be part of the problem-solving brigade rather than the problem-creating squad.
The joint survey conducted by the Unified District Information for Education and the Education Ministry in 2022 found that the drop-out rate was highest in Manipur and Meghalaya. In Meghalaya the drop -out rate was 9.8% from Classes 1-5. I am unsure when this data was mined but having visited rural Meghalaya extensively and questioned parents and students themselves who now happily work as cowherds and shepherds or in the farms, the number could be much higher. The state of education in Meghalaya is in a shambles. Government should now make it a priority to correct the anomalies in rural schools and leave the urban elite schools to themselves. Government has to make monthly inspections a priority and correct teacher and student absenteeism. It is imperative to work in tandem with parents, and, if possible, Government should activate those adult education centers that used to work well at one time. An aware parent is essential to the academic growth of the child.