On Teaching - In defence of the blackboard, the research and the sincerity

Einstein has said – “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.” (The quote has been attributed to other scientists too, like Feynman, or Rutherford – doesn’t matter.) The point is, one’s ability to educate another being endowed with supposedly lesser knowledge has been considered the touchstone of one’s own understanding of things. In the past month, yours truly has been educated, has educated, and has been educated about education. So it makes sense to dwell upon the question of teaching, learning and education.

There has been a long debate on whether education is for life or for livelihood. I would say it is for both – but in a prescribed order – livelihood, and then life. For life cannot exist without livelihood, and here livelihood just does not mean qualifying for some job. It is meant in a much broader sense – to be able to make sense of the world around one and to adapt one’s responses so as to enable one to live. It is said that experience is the best teacher. However, the modern human life throws up situations whose responses are not a part of our individual experiences. Ergo, we need to benefit from the collective experience of the humankind – past, and present. This requires that we imbibe the experiences of 108 Billion lifetimes within what we can afford to call our preparatory period. (for that is the number of humans who have ever lived,according to Population Research Bureau – link here) As we can see, at this task, we are disadvantaged by the odds of upto 1 : 10¹¹!! So, we need some mechanism by which we can distil the essence of the human experience in a form which is amenable to be transferred to an average human being within a reasonably short part of his / her lifetime. This mechanism is what the ‘formal education’ system should be.

It is obvious that all this knowledge cannot be taken in as a litany of specific instances. It is not feasible to learn that if an apple is released from above, it will fall; and if a pen is released from above, it will fall. What is needed to be learned that, in general, things released from above will fall. Not everything follows this law – a helium balloon will not fall if released from above – at least not in the troposphere! However, to know that things, when released, do fall, is good enough a fact to help a person survive if put to a situation where he has to choose between walking off a ledge and staying on. My whole point is that any system of education must equip the educated with the generalizations of life. How one arrives at the generalization is the teacher’s prerogative. One may go at it at once – heavier than air things fall when released – so does a ball, so does an apple. Conversely, one may arrive at the generalization via examples – an apple falls, a ball falls, hence any heavier than air object falls.

I know ‘generalization’ is a word in quite bad odour these days with the practitioners of the new fangled pedagogical techniques. One of these techniques, invented half a century back, but gaining currency across disciplines now, is the “Case Study” method. Here, the pupil is given a specific instance – containing various specific facts, and specific happenings. I am not sure what is expected of the poor pupil in this case. Is he to read the story as an interesting plot? Or is he to glean generalizations from a single narrative? The former, though is easy, is entirely futile, as can be seen from our previous discussion – individual narratives hardly suffice as good learning concepts. The latter, on the whole, is very dangerous. One of the jokes, which is often bandied about as a cautionary tale against generalization by the proponents of case approach, goes as follows –

“It is time to elect a new world leader, and only your vote counts. Here are the facts about the three candidates.

Candidate A.

Associates with crooked politicians, and consults with an astrologist. He's  had two mistresses.   He also chain smokes and drinks 8 to 10 martinis a day.

Candidate B.

He was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used opium in college and drinks a quart of whiskey every evening.

Candidate C.

He is a decorated war hero. He's a vegetarian, doesn't smoke, only drinks an occasional beer and never cheated on his wife.

 Which of these candidates would be your choice? Decide first ... no peeking, then scroll down for the response.

Candidate A is Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Candidate B is Winston  Churchill.
Candidate C is Adolph Hitler.”

While that may serve as a warning that generalization may lead to an Adolf Hitler rising to the top at the expense of more worthy candidates like Churchill and Roosevelt, what is the positive takeaway the reader may get from this narrative? Absolutely nothing. Thus, I conclude my argument that teaching through cases is, at best, a very slow and tiresome way of leading to what could be easily accomplished in 10 minutes of a direct blackboard lecture, and, at worst, a scheming brainwashing of impressionable minds.

Another variety of these new ideas is the ‘do-it-yourself’ school of thought. Yours truly has had the misfortune of facing this pedagogical weapon during the painful years of his pursuit of his MBA degree. Most teachers never stood up to the blackboard – either they circulated a printed copy of some ‘case’ to read and understand whatever one wanted to, or they gave us a topic to prepare a powerpoint presentation on. While the former led to no learning at all, the latter led to slow and torturous progress, and at the same time, rendered the teachers redundant in our eyes – well, if we were so good at learning, why do we need to pay for someone to sit at the back of the class and ruminate (in the bovine sense)!

Coming back to the quote at the beginning – all my teachers, whom I consider good, had three things in common – a. an excellent command over the subject they were supposed to be teaching, b. readiness to roll up the sleeves at the blackboard and to slog it out the old fashioned way, step by step, instead of using the smokescreen of jargon, when met with a query and c. a tendency to be in the front of the class, almost never at the back, except at evaluation time. When yours truly stepped up for the job of teaching a couple of classes, one followed their lead – teaching basic English grammar to beginners does not require much background, but still, half an hour on the internet cleared the cobwebs that had settled on the concepts of ‘classification of nouns’ and ‘declensions of verbs’. Then, at the stage of execution, one held the fort in front of the board. Examples were used to build concepts, and then the concepts were defined and written down, followed by test examples to apply these written rules. Regular feedback was taken, and all the lags were corrected on the spot. In the end, it was a real joy to notice that one was able to make them string along grammatically correct translations in English of simple Hindi sentences – with the aid of the notes on the basic “how-to-do’s” given by me. For that was what they had come expecting from me, and I was able to fulfil my duty.

Finally, I must come to the subject of teaching values – clamour for which has started to crescendo in the aftermath of some really ghastly crimes of the recent times. That we have a need to teach values is a truth. However, values cannot be taught the way science and mathematics are taught. Of course, law can be taught in that way, to some extent, as a list of do’s and dont’s. That may lead to some improvement in the social behaviour, purely because of the threat of various penal provisions. Of course, that is how values are being taught these days – as a checklist of pieties. That, perhaps, in conjunction with the subject of the previous paragraphs, is the greatest tragedy of today’s education system – what needs to be taught by example is being taught as dogmatic fact, and what needs to be taught as fact is being taught by nebulous examples. Values are best learned when we see our role models behave in the society. For most of us, these role models are either parents or teachers. Parental behaviour is often governed by the socioeconomic strata they come from, and the whole purpose of value education is to steer the offsprings from this behaviour endemic to certain unfortunate circumstances to more socially acceptable thoughts and behaviour. Here, the role of the teacher’s behaviour and the learning environment is even more important – it has to first cause unlearning, and then, perhaps, new learning. Here comes the second biggest tragedy of today’s educational scenario – there is a huge chasm between the values that are attempted to be taught, and the values that are on display in the workings of the teacher and the whole educational system. You cannot teach liberal principles when all your system is steeped in orthodoxy. You cannot teach honesty when your system itself is a vulgar display of venality. You cannot teach independence of thought when sycophancy is the way things are done around the place. While the concurrence of letter and spirit is a requirement in all places, nowhere is it more important than in a place of learning and training. In absence of such oneness, hypocrisy is quite easy to learn; even the most incompetent and insincere teachers can teach it by example!

The headlines are all gloomy these days, and sometimes it may appear that all is going to the dogs. A hard steering is needed. The judicial-correctional system is reeling under the pressure of reforming deviants by their millions, but what really is needed is an improvement in the inflow to the population, through better training of minds. The nation cannot improve without an improvement in the educational & training system –for straight nails cannot be forged on a crooked anvil.