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.
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.
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.
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.
8 comments:
nice article ravish..
Staying raw and virgin is the best way to live ---- Generalisation ,i feel lead to marginalisation of thoughts and learnings---- i love being winston churchill.... BDW --- an
involving article raveesh bhai ---
Thought provoking! Btw this applies to almost all posts that you make on your FB page. I am a fan of yours Ravish. Keep writing!
Thanks, Anant, Yogesh and Kanishka.
Well-written Raveesh...as always...
There is a joke that the education system hasn't taught me how to file an FIR, how to get a driver's license, how to file a case in the consumer court, how to read road signs, but i can tell you what the Pythagorean Theorem is...
Point to be made is, education system is not furthering my cause to understand how the society works and how to get along well in it. It is teaching me skills to clear entrance exams to get a job.
Also, the case study based method is effectively employed for certain streams only. You cannot teach grammar through a case study - then again, maybe you can but then you would have to stretch the case to include all the aspects of grammar that you wish to teach.
Anyway, whether you use a black board or use a case study or do-it-yourself, the difference will be made by, one, the quality of the person who practices it and, two, the relevance of that knowledge to practical life.
A person (Tiwari Sir of TOFF) can misuse the blackboard and another can successfully deploy case study for the intended learning outcome. It depends on the quality and intention of the practitioner. And the syllabus, and its applicability to make life better, is a question that needs to be looked into in detail - but not by ministers.
Ha ha ha...Tiwari sir - I'd differ with you on the opinion about him. I'd say that in addition to TOFF and FMS, he taught us Differential Mathematics first :)
Totally missed out on the syllabus part - would have been interesting.
"You cannot teach liberal principles when all your system is steeped in orthodoxy..."
Hope our system gets a whole lot 'game-changers' out of the new batch from the foothills of Mussoorie this time...
Fingers crossed...
Well-crafted Sir!!
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