Wednesday 1 July 2015

Hemantha Kalam - 34 'Educating Education'

I was a topper in school or at least one among the top three, till I was in my 8th Standard / Grade. Later, I was more interested in reading anything and anything, thus eclipsing my interest in the class books and work. And within 3 years, by the time I reached my Secondary School Leaving Certificate level (SSLC-11th Standard / Grade) , I fell down to the ranks of the just about average student. As I continued with my college education, my interests expanded into NCC and learning music and I fell down to abysmal depths in the college studies and it was, indeed, a struggle for me to complete my college education.

So much so, that after coming out of college, I confided with my father that I no longer wished to waste his money (with whose support I was continuing my education) and my time, in pursuing something which has, time and again, proved to be elusive for me. That later I did management courses on my own and did quite well is another story.

In retrospect, I think I did not do very badly in life though my foundation has been quite weak. Today, people, at least some of them, consider me knowledgeable if not educated – a small gratification.

All this was possible because I was given a chance, more than once, in fact. My failures were tolerated. But today, the educational scenario in the country seems to have so drastically changed that there is neither tolerance nor a chance seems to be given to those who cannot make it – by the standards set in (most absurd levels, in my opinion) by the schools, which are now more identical to factories.

So why am I talking about this today, several decades after I had completed my educational odyssey? A report in yesterday’s Telugu newspaper ‘Eenaadu’ (http://epaper.eenadu.net/svww_index1.php) triggered my thoughts and culminated into this lament that it is.

The news item says that many schools, especially those in the private sector, in Tamil Nadu, a state of south India, are not permitting the lesser bright and not so bright students to take their qualifying examinations by forcefully evicting them out of schools, at the 9th Standard / Grade for not performing up to ‘their expectations’. The rationale - the schools have taken up on themselves the onus to guarantee a 100% pass percentage.

The figures for the year 2013-14, provided by the news item, are that 1,169,110 students were admitted into the 9th Standard / Grade but out of them only 1,072,691 have been promoted to 10th Standard / Grade. If readers think that the balance 96,419 (8.25%) students have failed to make the mark in their 9th Standard / Grade examinations, they would be in for a surprise. The news item says that these students have been cajoled, coaxed or forcefully evicted from the school by giving them a Transfer Certificate even before they could face the 9th Standard / Grade examinations. No records show that these evicted students got admitted in any other school; as no school would be touching them with a barge pole.

Now, the saga continues. That among the 1,072,691 who entered into the 10th Standard / Grade, only 1,060,940 students were permitted to face the qualifying examinations leaving behind a further 11,751 students not permitted to take the examinations. So totally out of the 1,169,110 students, finally only 1,060,940 students took the examinations leaving behind 108,170 (9.25%) students to face their own fate.

The alarming point is that now the malicious disease seems to be spreading to the government schools as well.

As it is, with even the educated youth of the country facing lack of employability skills, leaving about 10% behind every year, just because they are unable to reach the ‘expected’ grade / efficiency levels, are not the educational institutions doing gross injustice to the children and also to the future of the country?

Is the government taking necessary actions to provide alternate education to these ‘deprived’ and evicted students? How efficient is that system. If that system is working, how come there is a genuine scarcity for skilled workers in various trades such as Electrical, Plumbing, Masonry and so on….?

All this reminds me of a fabled task I used to listen from elders to think out of box. The task is simple. Make a vertical straight line smaller than what it appears now, without erasing or painting or covering over it, blah blah blah. Many people fail and one smart alec simply draws another vertical line a tad longer than the one already there making the first one look smaller in comparison.

To me somehow the present education system looks a bit similar. You want to show only success so decimate the failures! What nonsense?

Again, what is the purpose of education?

Writing in the Campus Newspaper ‘Maroon tiger’ Martin Luther King (Jan-Feb 1947 ‘The purpose of Education’ Atlanta, Ga) said;

“Education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society:
the one is utility and the other is culture…………….

…The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”

In the recent years, running behind the so called ‘efficiency’ which anyway seems to be quite questionable, as our education system seems to be based more on the rote system, aren’t the citizens losing their right to education and a proper one at that?

What will happen to the 10% who are denied of their education year after year? If they cannot get admission in any other educational institution, as almost all schools follow the same method of elimination, and they cannot get any life skills, is not the education system and the department concerned responsible for turning them to abject poverty or into wannabe / forced criminals?

After all, every man having come into the world has to live and when they are denied / deprived of using their available mental resources in the name of pseudo-efficiency how do they make a living? Is not the government and other sections of the society concerned, giving a license to poverty / crime this way?

We work to give some succour to the differently abled. Now these students who cannot make the grade also are differently abled. What efforts are taken to find out their aspirations and choices? Why should the system be so blindly driven and people are made / forced to follow?

As the children are put into schools at such a tender age of 1 ½ years and 2 years they are already deprived of their childhood. If they are also deprived of schooling opportunities because they do not meet the school requirements, what is their fate? It is a clear case of lost childhood in the face of an imaginary oasis which ultimately turns to a mere mirage.

Who is responsible for botching up their lives? Has any worthwhile study been undertaken to prove that such tender children should not be sent into schools? I am sure that there would be any number of studies to the contrary.

In my humble and considered opinion there appears to be a case to urgently ‘Educate the Education’ departments in the country. The later we do this, the more the country could lose. As it is, excepting among a handful of citizens, we have questionable civic sense, common belongingness or common responsibility. It is more by the grace of the omnipresence or by providence that things seem to be happening.

There is a dire need to bring in civic sense, moral sense and common responsibility among the people and if schools do not do that, who are the better agents for that?  

Pray, tell me, if you can! 

Till then, 

Krutagjnatalu (Telugu), Nanri (Tamil), Dhanyavaadagalu (Kannada), Nanni (Malayalam), Dhanyavaad (Hindi), Dhanyosmi (Sanskrit), Thanks (English), Dhonyavaad (Bangla), Gracias (Spanish), Grazie (Italian), Danke Schon (Deutsche), Merci (French), Obrigado (Portuguese), Shukraan (Arabic), Shukriya (Urdu), Sthoothiy (Sinhalese) Aw-koon (Khmer), Kawp Jai Lhai Lhai (Laotian), Kob Kun Krab (Thai) and Asante (Kiswahili), Maraming Salamat sa Lahat (Pinoy-Tagalog-Filipino), Tack (Swedish)

Hemantha Kumar Pamarthy
Chennai, India


11 comments:

  1. Totally agree with you Hemantha. I am dead against this and never bothered too much about my own children's grades or those of my own students when I was correspondent of a very popular school in T. Nagar founded by my father to raise funds for our charitable institutions and free schools in Chetpet.
    I wrote out a tale that was longer than your entire blog post, so decided to cut it down to these few worlds.

    While neighbouring schools used this system. I took the so called weak students into my school after talking to the children and their parents encouraging them that nothing was wrong with their progeny.

    Most students are like you were Hemantha, at that age, so much to fill a curious mind.
    Thankfully my higher secondary school classes eleven and twelve were always filled with such discards apart from the students who came up from our own school.

    The happy story was that the edu department allowed me to start a commerce group without advanced math but with computer studies instead.
    This was a missing factor in some of best neighbouring schools, So my school did not have to canvas for students and our results were always good.

    The best fruit of progress is of course the result in latter years and that comes in the form of old students from the different countries of the world, all who had their humble beginnings in my school.
    My happiest news is four of those graduates are my own children. All at the top of their careers with the blessings of God.

    No Hemantha, filtering is wrong. Students are human and must not be treated like functional units.
    Every one has a hidden strength and quality, God given to be nurtured by wise teachers.
    That is the way our education should go.

    I enjoyed writing this. Take it from the horses mouth. :)

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    Replies
    1. Dear Doctor,

      I, indeed, stand gratified! As long as people like us can work, I am sure we can make that difference - however tiny that could be!

      Thank you for taking time off to read and respond doctor. You and others who respond make my writing meaningful and more importantly purposeful!

      Thank you so much!

      Best Regards
      Hemantha

      Delete
  2. Sense, Sensibility, Sensitiveness, etc, have become endangered in today's mechanized world. Rightly put, there has to be education on quality of education to educate the future in the best possible educated manner!

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  3. Thank you doctor Raj,

    Cemetery, Poverty, Time and GOD are great equalisers. Every one will have something and everyone will have nothing of something. Every one must be bestowed with something good. Instead of giving them that badly needed opportunity, filtering and doing away with them in toto is not only injustice but downright arrogance and maybe abrogation of their existence too. And this cannot be and should not be tolerated!

    Thanks for your thoughts dear Doctor. Much appreciated and much obliged!

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  4. I m one of d silent reader of ur blogs. this blog made me 2 respond, as this specific area always concentrate on schools n students.my POV is why no one talk abt parents. you are one of the gifted kid of lovely parents who r willing to make u d mistakes/failures. but hw many parents even think wht their kid want to be? its like a trade where v ve supply n demand concept. if demand reduces thn supply bcme easier.all parents think tht schools ONLY make their kids to shine.so they jus dump them n schools n thiruchengodu, namakkal n other prominent ones which r notorious for their attitude towards their results. if parents jus chill out n take a one step back n see whtelse they have for their kids other than these schools. parents r jus concerned abt their kids education only n June and march as exams fall there. I believe it shud b more than that n seen as a journey n not 2 be like, parents suffered so their kids shudnt so dump them n a big school n push them hard.
    meanwhile I m a cat on d wall guy during d ntire schooling.
    Way 2 go sir!!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. I agree with you dear Mr. Prasanna.

      With both parents working phenomenon, many parents are having children more by accident than by planning. Once the children are there, many parents are at their wits end and are looking quickly for a way out and these play schools etc., come to their rescue. And when the children return home much earlier than their parents most of them loiter in front of their closed houses like orphans. What a sad start of life for the children?

      And then the frustrated visions of the parents. Those parents who wanted to be something in life and who could not be, wish that over for their offspring. We observe this happening many a time nowadays. In this process the children's interests are mostly not taken into account.

      I wanted to be different. I chose to get married to a woman who will take care of the house and take care of the children. And in the process I could not easily get a 'non-working' bride for a long time and finally when I got one I was quite delayed for the marriage. Yet, when we had children, both daughters, we did not rue but tried to give them their own space. My wife took care of the house and the children and was and has been a pillar of support for the children even when I had to travel extensively on job related work. Economically, we might have become weaker than many others because of single salary, but on the morality and ethical side, I think we had been quite rich and I am vindicated that my decision has been good!

      I made a promise to myself that I shall never interfere with my children's dreams of their life, kept up that promise and I am still alive to see that that experiment did not fail.

      Many parents measure success of their children only with marks and ranks. What a retrograde thinking? It is not only Namakkal and Tiruchengode. Places like Kota, Rajasthan and many 'dedicated' schools in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have literally become factories, and poor kids are caught in a vice between expecting parents and demanding schools. Many children are indulging in committing suicides out of helplessness and unable to undergo various pressures on all sides..

      This means, those parents, despite being 'educated' are not really educated, as they are unable to empathise with their children's thoughts or sensibilities.

      This is the reason I titled this blog, 'Educating Eduction'

      Thank you so much for your thoughts, time and care to respond! Much appreciated and obliged. Thank you, indeed!

      Delete
  5. I m one of d silent reader of ur blogs. this blog made me 2 respond, as this specific area always concentrate on schools n students.my POV is why no one talk abt parents. you are one of the gifted kid of lovely parents who r willing to make u d mistakes/failures. but hw many parents even think wht their kid want to be? its like a trade where v ve supply n demand concept. if demand reduces thn supply bcme easier.all parents think tht schools ONLY make their kids to shine.so they jus dump them n schools n thiruchengodu, namakkal n other prominent ones which r notorious for their attitude towards their results. if parents jus chill out n take a one step back n see whtelse they have for their kids other than these schools. parents r jus concerned abt their kids education only n June and march as exams fall there. I believe it shud b more than that n seen as a journey n not 2 be like, parents suffered so their kids shudnt so dump them n a big school n push them hard.
    meanwhile I m a cat on d wall guy during d ntire schooling.
    Way 2 go sir!!!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I m one of d silent reader of ur blogs. this blog made me 2 respond, as this specific area always concentrate on schools n students.my POV is why no one talk abt parents. you are one of the gifted kid of lovely parents who r willing to make u d mistakes/failures. but hw many parents even think wht their kid want to be? its like a trade where v ve supply n demand concept. if demand reduces thn supply bcme easier.all parents think tht schools ONLY make their kids to shine.so they jus dump them n schools n thiruchengodu, namakkal n other prominent ones which r notorious for their attitude towards their results. if parents jus chill out n take a one step back n see whtelse they have for their kids other than these schools. parents r jus concerned abt their kids education only n June and march as exams fall there. I believe it shud b more than that n seen as a journey n not 2 be like, parents suffered so their kids shudnt so dump them n a big school n push them hard.
    meanwhile I m a cat on d wall guy during d ntire schooling.
    Way 2 go sir!!!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Completely Agree with you Sir. This is a very serious problem that needs to be addressed and understood by every parent and educationalist. Let the children be given Freedom to explore what they want!!

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    Replies
    1. Thank you so much for thinking alike Abhisti ji!

      The issue is that we need more like us not only to think in this way but also to practice!

      Thank you again for your time, reading and responding! Much appreciated and obliged! :-)

      Delete