Volunteering as a teacher in a school in a remote village in eastern India some months ago brought back all the many horrors that I had to suffer over many years as a school student.
'Mainstream' schooling in India remains almost exactly as authoritarian, torturous and alienating for most children as it was when I was in school almost half a century ago, I discovered. Little wonder, then, that few of my students evinced any interest at all in their studies, and that their general academic performance was dismal
. Almost unanimously, they regarded school as a burden that simply had to be tolerated.
Formal schooling is a relatively new phenomenon in this area. Just two generations ago, few, if any, of the folks in the village went to school. And, if their ancestors almost never went to school and were still able to get along with their lives reasonably well, why, I asked my students, was it now thought essential that they should suffer school, even though almost all of them hated it?
I got many answers to this seemingly perplexing question. For one thing, studying in school was now almost universally believed to be the done thing for a child, just as eating and breathing were. If two generations ago it was simply inconceivable for a child to be forced to spend years on end memorizing books that he didn't enjoy at all or hardly understood, it was now considered to the most appropriate thing to do.
A child who had been spared years of suffering school was now considered to be a failure, as almost a lesser being than the rest, although he might well lead a happier, more contented life. Such has been the devastating impact of the notion of compulsory schooling and the supposed benefits of 'modern' education.
Job ticket
The only reason why my students were in school, I discovered, was because they had been led to believe that without a school-leaving certificate it would be impossible for them to get a 'good' job—by which they meant not a job that would help them unfold their latent talents or one that would be socially useful but, simply, a well-paid job which also commanded power and prestige.
Although most of the parents of my students were farmers (the vast majority being poor, owning only small bits of land), none of my students wanted to follow their parents' profession. Almost every one of them was desperate to escape from what they regarded as the drudgery and poverty of village life.
Television (almost every second house in this impoverished area now boasts of a television set, with literally hundreds of channels, Indian and Western available for viewing) has opened to them the dream of 'making it big' in the 'big city', and many of my students dreamt of landing up with a well-paid job in one or the other of India's metropolises. And, for that purpose alone, they believed, it was essential to suffer school, and then college and university perhaps. Tragically, there was no provision in the school—or in any other school in the entire area—to guide senior students in terms of career prospects, future course options and scholarships. All of this they were expected to negotiate on their own.
But if my students almost all dreamt of landing themselves well-paid jobs, seeing schooling as simply a means to secure that goal, hardly any of them were willing to put in the requisite effort. Clearly, the educational system was a miserable failure even in terms of providing students the information that they would find useful in terms of securing a job. Few of my students were at all interested in what they were forced to study. Hardly any really understood the books prescribed in their curriculum. It was not entirely their fault, though.
The books were almost all in English, a language they were hardly fluent in, and the syllabus, which was obviously geared to students from elite, English-speaking backgrounds, had no relationship whatsoever with their specific social and cultural context. My students didn't seem to understand—and nor did I—why they had to suffer years of reading Shakespeare and Shelly, Logarithms, Calculus, the Chemical Table and lessons in convoluted, highly Sanskritised Hindi in order to secure the jobs that they dreamt of securing.
If the curriculum that they were forced to go through was alienating and unrelated to their needs and aspirations, it was hardly surprising that my students exhibited little curiosity to learn and question. Efforts to provoke them to think for themselves were met with blank looks and muffled laughter. My students honestly admitted that they found reading tearfully boring. Almost the only time they read anything—their textbooks—was just before their examinations.
But it wasn't that they really understood or liked what they were forced to read then.
Most of them simply memorized large bits of the textbooks, generally without comprehending a word, and these they were expected to faithfully vomit out in the examination room and then promptly, and much to their relief, forget. That was the extent to which they took any interest in their
studies.
Poorly trained
My students faced another problem: poorly-trained, unenthusiastic teachers, who didn't seem to bother at all about nurturing their curiosity. The method of instruction the teachers employed was calculated to dampen any enthusiasm for learning.
By and large, most teachers simply read out entire passages from tearfully-boring textbooks and dictated answers which students were supposed to memorise in order to pass their examinations.
Being lowly-paid, even by village standards, the general lack of enthusiasm of the teachers was hardly surprising. Many of them gave relatively expensive private tuitions to the very same students whom they supposedly taught during class-hours in order to supplement their meagre incomes. Creative thinking was generally not encouraged, and many teachers expected their students simply to repeat in their examinations the supposed 'correct' answers that they had supplied them with in class. New methods of teaching, such as through play, group activities and using audio-visual means, were almost completely absent.
Little wonder, then, that even senior students in the school were unable to speak a sentence of grammatically-correct English (although this school, like the rest of the schools, including government schools, in the area, was a supposedly English-medium school). They remembered little, if anything at all, of what they had studied in previous years. And their general knowledge as well as their comprehension of their textbooks was extremely limited.
My students all dreamt of acquiring well-paid jobs, reflecting mounting expectations of rapid 'upward' social mobility among the poor in general. Yet, I knew (and this I had to explain to them very delicately) that, given their overall standard, their dreams might well remain just that.
Official statistics about supposedly impressive educational 'progress' in the area hide an ugly reality: of a growing number of extremely poorly educated people with unrealistic expectations of rapid economic 'success', and who see education as simply a means to fulfill these dreams. The schooling that they have gone through has little or nothing to do with 'character-building' or 'value-education'. Considering themselves 'educated', few of them are willing to work, as their parents did, in the fields.
But in the 'big city', where they hope to 'make it big', hardly any of them manage to get anything more than petty jobs.