Samacheer Kalvi - Equal education utopia

The concept of Equal Education to all is definitely an utopian dream. It is also a useless goal. It is like everyone trying to be a part of every conversation on earth. Such equality is not necessary, not useful, not practical and total waste of energy in trying to plan and implement such a dream.

It is moreover, unfair to 90% of the people. One size fits all does not fit 90% of the people. The same goes for education.

There are differently abled children. They need different levels of education, speed of progress in education, etc. To survive in this world & to provide some service to fellow people (in order to earn for daily bread, shelter and clothing) different people need different skills.

We cannot have 1 billion prime ministers. We need all kinds of people performing different tasks working for a united mankind. For that, the belief has to be that many people are born with different skills. Those skills need to be honed by education - and for that we need different types of education. Moreover, there are slow learners, autistic children, dyslexic children, mentally retarded children and others who need special care and education at a more relaxed pace.

For these to be catered for, we need State board syllabus (easiest and simple base education) to Matriculation, to Anglo-Indian, to CBSE to ICSE boards of education, along with National Open School (more flexible for people who wish to take up other professions at early age, like sports / acting), International Baccalaureate (not to be confused by International school term, which is used intentionally to confuse & which usually follows CBSE / ICSE syllabus) and local language schools (most important, in my opinion).

Better still is the Gurukulam style of education where every child is given more focus (again not to be confused with modern Gurus "collecting" disciples).

One other drawback with equal education is that the brilliant students are dragged down to an average level, while the slow learners and others feel pressured and left out of "learning". We will spoil the children and reduce the chances of having great leaders, scientists, philosophers and other great people required for our country.

I hope, pray and request the appropriate authorities to not look into Equal education as a goal. We should look into strengthening the strong points & improving on the weaknesses we have in the different systems.

VRVD

Out of Portions - Hilarious

In the past few years, I have been hearing from parents that "The paper was very tough," or worse still "Some of the questions were out of portions, the children could not even understand."

Many times I find that the questions are clear and need the application of the mind, using the concepts and fundamentals taught in class. Sometimes the application of multiple concepts in sequence or in parallel is required, which is somehow not being encouraged at home (in most cases) and at school (in some cases). The fact that they ask the questions in first place makes us feel a little better that the school wants the children to think about the subjects learnt.

Some teachers explicitly instruct the children to learn the answers by heart and award marks only on exact reproduction. This is directly killing the thinking brain in the children. We are explicitly encouraging memorization and discouraging understanding of concepts and fundamentals.

One incident in my college in the very first year, about 25 years ago, was with first test of Modern Physics. The first two chapters had been taught in about 15 classes (3 classes per week) and all the freshers (mandatory subject for about 500+ students) were eager to tackle the paper. There were only 4 questions, where the application of the concepts had to be done either repeatedly or combined across the two chapters. We got to know the school education that had blunted the brain, in the results, where-in 108 students scored ZERO and the average for the whole batch was 4 (out of 18). There were a few who scored full marks having applied the concepts learnt rather than wonder why the question does not resemble anything that was taught singly.

Life is not going to give us lessons and then ask questions within the portions. So, to prepare children for life, application of mind is important and to be encouraged. Creativity to be encouraged by making them think over-and-above the portions.

VRVD

Fundamentals and Concepts are important

Education in India has become more and more tuned towards rote learning, rather than learning of fundamentals and concepts. This is leading to a dangerous trend as the creativity of children are suppressed. When importance is given to repeating the given answers, then children learn them by-heart instead of learning the fundamentals and concepts.

As we move into higher classes, application of concepts should be encouraged, but is not, in Indian system of education, especially the majority of education boards like the state level boards. In real life, can we say that we are facing ONLY the scenarios that we have learnt answers for? We have to work with the fundamentals and concepts we have learnt to deal with the situation.

It is the same for technical areas, commercial areas, business areas, financial areas, etc. We take the concepts and fundamentals and use them to build our work / solutions using them. The people who can do this well are usually successful, while the others who learnt only by rote learning will have to adapt and start learning from scratch.

Hence, it is important to imbibe in children the requirement of learning concepts and fundamentals instead of rote learning. They will be more successful in life and in dealing with life's variety of scenarios.

VRVD