Learning to Think: The Trouble with Our Education System

My long awaited summer is well here. Somehow, it isn't as exciting as I had imagined. In my excessive free time, I have also been helping an eleven year old neighbor who studies at a quality, private school with her homework. Most of the time, the sheer uselessness of the homework irks me. Some ambiguously worded questions in Geometry in Math seem to have no application whatsoever. Even worse are the "long answer questions" which require the student to only pick up paragraphs from the text. Let alone critical reading skills, this curriculum doesn't even seem to teach basic writing skills.

Today, my neighbor studying in the sixth grade came to me with some questions in Computer Science.They are learning "Mail Merge" on Microsoft Word. She opened a book with an entire chapter dedicated to this feature of MS Word. The chapter was organized as follows: One page to describe the mail merge feature and its benefits; the remaining remaining pages of the chapter dedicated implementation instructions.

The instructions were divided into 7-8 steps including "Starting Mail Merge", "Creating A Mail Merge Document", "Saving the document", "Printing the document",etc. Each step included bullet points to describe the process and screenshots where required.

I asked my young pupil what her questions were. She showed me an exercise with a list of questions:
1) Write the steps to do the following in a Mail Merge Document:

  • Start a mail merge document
  • Create a mail merge document
  • Save the document
  • Print the document
She also showed me the pages with the exact subheadings. I asked her then what the problem was. She showed the section for printing the document. The instructions said, "Click on print. Then follow as shown in the diagram (a screenshot)."

The girl said, "Am I supposed to draw the entire diagram?"
"No, do you know how to print a document?",I asked.
"Yes."
"Tell me how."
"In MS Office 2007, there's a circular button which has a print option. Then I click okay", she replied in Hindi. 
"Great. So write that down in points in English."
She stared at her book for a while.
"Fine. Tell me how you would teach someone to print, in English."
She asked, "How do I do that?"
"Like you do in any conversation."
Still nothing.
I repeated the answer she had given me a few seconds ago. Then sensing her hesitation, I translated it to English.

To my surprise, she recited what I said. She tried to recite it again and she missed the step about clicking the "print" option. 

In her class, this girl is among the academically best students. Yet,  she cannot articulate the process of printing a word document to another person. Then how has she been scoring her top notch grades? Apparently, by rote learning. But she is hardly to blame. Independent thought is not cultivated in our schools. Our students are not encouraged to think, only to regurgitate their textbook material. Oftentimes, deviation from this standard penalizes the student instead. We are taught that to any question, there is only one right answer and that's on page number x, in paragraph number y in the book.

Recently, CBSE has introduced several changes in the academic structure of middle and high school classes, especially CCE (Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation). Here, I think they're battling the wrong feature of our curriculum. We don't need more evaluation. We need real learning. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Neighborhood Project: Teaching Kids English.

Image
I stayed back at school today to teach underprivileged kids from our neighborhood. It's been a month since I started doing this. Most of the time, it's fun. I mean, you call the shots; you get a delicious little meal (even more delicious since you're ravenous after school) from the canteen; you teach some amusing kids; and the best part: you can tell yourself that you are contributing to your society. What more do you want? Over the few weeks, I've come to the conclusion that kindergarten teachers probably work much more than high school teachers. If you think teaching a couple of restless, 4 year-olds the English alphabet is easy, well, you sure are mistaken! These children need far more attention, patience and encouragement than a high school student learning trigonometry. See it this way, which is harder to do: teach someone to ride a bicycle or teach an average cyclist a bunch of cool tricks? You get my point. So if I become a school principal, I'll make s
Read more

What We Do in the Name of God: An Account of My Visit to SriKalahasti Temple

Image
Yesterday, I visited an ancient, renowned temple called SriKalahasti with my family ( 8 people ranging from age 5 to 6).My account of this visit is from the perspective of an agnostic who is hesitant to travel to another state just for pooja and darshan at a temple. SriKalahasti Temple As soon as we stepped outside the bubble of our tourist car, we were surrounded by several unkempt, hungry pilgrims. They all began speaking at once. They had traveled from far off places and had no money. One of them requested for money to buy food. My uncle opened his wallet and handed over a few rupee notes and coins. That was enough to attract another bunch of saffron clad pilgrims. We managed to evade them and enter the temple premises. The inner premise of SriKalahasti was constructed back in the 5th century A.D. whereas the extended area was built in the 12th century. It is only expected that the structure would be imposing and awe-inspiring. We were told that the puja was not to beg
Read more

Tales from Abu Dhabi

Image
Airports seem to be the place for unique experiences. While waiting to board a midnight flight from Abu Dhabi to Delhi, the passenger waiting area was full of immigrant workers - all men. Regardless of how safe the airport was, being the only female in a hall full of testosterone can be a frightful prospect. To my relief, a middle aged  American woman walked into the waiting area. She looked equally relieved to find a female face in a sea of men. We made sure we were seated next to each other. Later, a few more women walked in. Still, on a flight with over a hundred passengers, I could count the number of women on two hands.  During the flight, I learnt that the woman I had the just met was an entrepreneur. Engrossed, I asked her if her trip to India was a business trip. She replied in the affirmative. She ran a clothing line in Mexico whose production was based in Jaipur. She often visited India and some more Asian countries to oversee the production and in search of new materia
Read more