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. 

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