Write off academic year, reboot education

Please write off the academic session of 2020. Use the opportunity to reboot education to make India great again. This, by the way, was also the summary of the recommendation made by Macaulay in his much-maligned Minute of 1835. Think about giving the education sector a year-long sabbatical, use the opportunity to completely reframe education in India. Ask all the students to pick up any employment for a year, at whatever salaries their skills can command, much like what had been suggested by Professor Yashpal when he was the UGC Chair. When they come back to school, college and university the next year, they will demand more from their professors and not settle for the usual glop.

The Covid-hit education sector in India is discovering that it is completely ill-prepared for anything which involves ‘self-study’. Many Indian universities and schools are scrambling to set up online learning without realising that such learning is entirely dependent on self-discipline on the part of the student. No wonder e-learning is not working. The unique kind of commitment and ability to focus on the part of the students which it demands is simply missing. The student, too, is not so much at fault. The current structure of formal courses of instruction is not amenable to e-learning. This education, whether in the arts, or the STEM (science, technology, engineering & mathematics), is too exotic, too generalised, too distant from actual life; provides few tangible or useful skills and completely avoids any meta-skill. Its administration is too centralised. The focus is far too much on controlling the teacher and the lesson; and, too little on urging the student to learn anything or develop any tangible or useful skill.

The main problem is not of resources, but of structures at the university’s end and commitment at the students’end.

Availability of computers or cell phones or tablets on which to learn lessons is an easily surmountable problem. Even the issue of connectivity can be resolved. After all, even if we ignore the episode of self-learning that the story of Eklavya represents, many of us did do our learning without computers, with poor teachers or almost no teachers and amidst a shortage of learning material.

Don’t get taken in by those brave statements about the number of webinars hosted by a teacher or the number of videographed lectures put up on some public portal or the claim that some teachers are successfully engaging their students in e-learning during the Covid pandemic. Those are statements of hope, they do not reflect the condition on the ground.

E-resources certainly supplement normal learning in a very narrow sort of manner. Even e-exams have been held. But, for some extremely focused purposes. However, today only a good liar, whether a student, teacher or administrator, can claim that e-learning can effectively overcome the loss of classroom teaching caused by the Covid pandemic.

Learning resources are not the problem, the desire to learn is. The UGC, the NCERT and distance education institutes like IGNOU, and the NIOS have a fairly long history of placing soft copies of lectures and books online. The Swayam portal too has been available. The National Digital Library of India has placed before us a very large body of learning resources. A handful of professors have even offered sharply focused courses for e-learning. Some universities and schools have also evaluated students for their e-learning and certified their competences.

But please remember, and this is the most important point, these are bits of learning and competences that are extremely focused, acquired by the students of their own volition and free will, often at high personal costs and with much personal commitment and, above all, they are over and above the normal learning that the student does in the classroom.

As we said earlier, the problem is not with the availability of resources for e-learning. It is the nature of present-day education which is the problem. Education currently involves giving the same bits of knowledge to a captive audience of students at the same time. The student chooses from a limited basket of generic subjects that are taught in a fairly stable sequence. There is a lot of regimentation. The onus of keeping the attention of students is entirely on the teacher. In some places, the teacher is even evaluated on the basis of the marks obtained by the students. That sparks off a process of grade inflation which makes it impossible to judge any student on the basis of the marks that they obtain in any of their regular scholastic exams.

It has often been pointed out that the process of handing out knowledge today has no place whatsoever for the specific interests of the student. What few point out, though, is that it does not have any tangible knowledge goals either.

Moreover, our normal system of education depends on forcing students to listen to lectures, read books and write essays and answer questions based on them. It does not demand much of either self-discipline, or focus from the student. It does not even ask of the student to master a subject. Just being able to write answers based on a narrow reading list is sufficient. In the present system of education, teachers are expected to perform tricks that will retain the students’ attention. One is reminded of the old adage about taking the horse to the water. You cannot force it to drink. To tell you the truth, a typical BA/MA in India puts in about 30 hours of forced sitting in lectures, 50 hours of reading, of a total of about 100 pages, to acquire their degree. It shows in their subsequent performance in whichever field they go. But we prefer to showcase only the handful few who buck this trend.

Even in the best of universities and schools, this kind of learning, with the best kind of professors and syllabi, is only tangentially connected with the experiences of daily living. Education is provided by removing the student from normal life and pushing them into a unique silo called the classroom. That is the reason why so many working people find it difficult to keep up with the present system of education unless they take total time off from their normal employment. Ask anyone who is employed and has attended evening classes at the same time. It takes a unique kind of commitment to be able to do both tasks simultaneously. It requires a strong sense of self-discipline and the ability to focus strongly on the task at hand without being bothered about conflicting demands of everyday living on one’s time and attention. In contrast, e-learning demands that the student remain embedded in the normal life of a grihastha and still manage to focus on acquiring learning which has no visible connection with that normal life.