The Seven Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems – Myth # 4 of 7

Or

The Seven Myths That Make Education Difficult To Improve

See Myth # 3 of 7 here.

Myth # 4 – Students learn mainly by listening to the teacher.

Listening is seriously valued – you must listen to your elders, pay attention to your teachers… as if major wisdom is dangling on their lips and will be lost if not caught by the ears that very instant. Now that you can not only look up information but actually hear lectures on all conceivable topics on the internet, this is one notion that is already past its sell-by date. In fact, it should never even have been available in the ‘sell’ category. Ultimately, it is what we reflect on, try out, adapt and work into our own understanding that emerges as learning, something the ‘constructivist’ thrust of the current NCF keeps emphasizing. By continuing to practice ‘listening-to-teacher-explaining’ as the core pedagogy, we ensure our students don’t get around to learning in the manner and at the level they are capable of.

One reason why this continues to prevail is due to the notion that teacher must ‘control’ the class – and the class can be controlled only if the teacher has something to offer that can be held back at will – namely, explanation-giving talk. By treating themselves as the ‘source’ of learning, adults in general, and teachers in particular, manage to hold themselves in a position of power vis-à-vis children, choosing what and when to offer – and emaciate children (mentally). All this talk of ‘developing our human resource’ and the ‘demographic dividend’ will bear fruit only if adults seriously make an effort to give up this kind of ‘power’.

In many ways, therefore, this myth is a bigger blockage than you might anticipate, since it operates to defeat the purpose of our efforts after we have succeeded in bringing the teacher and the student into school for a duration that is long enough to enable learning. This is the hole in the bucket, or one big explanation of the continuing low levels of learning across the board.

Unfortunately, it is proving really difficult to deal with. Despite the enormous amount of resources and effort spent on teacher development, practice continues to revert to the listening mode. Part of the reason may be cultural - after all the concept of the guru 'giving' his knowledge to the disciple orally is three thousand years old, runs in our blood and makes it difficult for us to believe that teaching can be anything else. 

One of the ways to address this might therefore be societally - it is only when parents, communities, society itself start expecting teachers to something different that it might happen...

What do you think?

Tomorrow, Myth # 5 of 7

The Seven Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems – Myth # 3 of 7

Or

The Seven Myths That Make Education Difficult To Improve

See Myth # 2 of 7 here.

Myth # 3 – There is one form of knowledge and it belongs to the ‘educated classes’

What do they know – after all, they’re only poor people. And real knowledge is that which is written in books and taught in universities, which of course they don’t have access to, isn’t it?

By now I’m sure you’re well aware of the vast variety and depth of knowledges that non-literate people bring – only it doesn’t get the recognition it deserves and is sentenced to remain marginalized and often die out.  By not respecting the knowledge heritage the vast majority of our students bring, we certainly deprive them of the one strength that can be used to learn ‘school’ knowledge – but we also lose out on the great contribution the diverse community knowledge heritage could make to the country. (I’ve written on this elsewhere in this blog hence not elaborating it further.)

Tomorrow, Myth # 4 of 7

The Seven Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems – Myth # 2 of 7

Or

The Seven Myths That Make Education Difficult To Improve

See Myth # 1 of 7 here.

Myth # 2 – All children must attend school every day

If you’re from a poor family, there’s a lot more to life than just attending school! Siblings and domestic animals have to be cared for, parents have to be helped, essentials such as water or firewood have to be fetched, birds and animals kept away from the farm, you may need to migrate with your parents…. It’s not necessary that all this is a waste – in fact, despite the shadow child labour, a lot of this is also learning for life.  Children who are in a position to attend daily too might learn a lot if they spent a day or two every week doing things other than school – such as tending to gardens, pursuing a passion, trying to earn something by putting their learning to use, solving a neigbhourhood problem, helping their siblings and parents, making things…. Or helping their underprivileged classmates so that they can spend more time in school.

The kind of focused (and therefore limited) scholastic learning our ‘advanced’ children end up doing has resulted in several luminaries pointing out that (even from institutions such as the IITs) our graduates are ‘unemployable’. One might add they haven’t developed many other aspects of their personality – including civic consciousness.

However, what this requirement of daily attendance does is to marginalize great numbers of children, since the teaching-learning process tends to be sequential (rather than re-iterative). If you miss out an earlier part, you can’t ‘keep up with the class’ and slowly head for being left out or pushed out or dropping out. Effectively, the school is saying: if you are poor and cannot attend regularly (as the we require), you shall not learn. Instead of: attend when you can, we’ll find a way to support you and make sure you learn (which is what the business of the school really is).

There are a few walk-in centres in the country (though of course only for poor and/or working children) and some of them do manage to attract and keep children for a long time even though there is no compulsion to attend. That kind of flexibility is perhaps too much to hope for in the school system. Enabling the school to be more responsive to children’s real living situations, though – that’s both possible and desirable. It needs a spiraling rather than linear flow, a variety and range of materials, and providing children engaging activities in many of which they will work on their own, and the use of a tracking system to keep record of progress. This gels with every provision of the RTE, with expectations put forward in our National Curriculum Framework, and much that contemporary understanding of pedagogy tells us. However, to make it happen what we need is not methods and materials but a way to get rid of this myth and the fear that everything will fall apart if the school seeks to respond (by adapting to children’s needs) rather than coerce (by making children adjust to its needs).

Any suggestions?

Tomorrow, Myth # 3 of 7


PS - Here's a response to a reader that might be of use.

• Sundara Velavan Could you please elaborate on the origins of this myth, sir and the underlying attitudes and beliefs from which this myth stems forth?

  43 mins · Like
• 

  Subir Shukla Sundara Velavan, I'm not really a historian of education, but from what little I know, for centuries formal learning took place in terms of the school room or gurukul. These were places where children of different ages came together, the teacher set the curriculum (i.e. decided who would learn what and how much, and when they had completed their studies), different students did different things, and sometimes advanced students were in charge of those beginning. 
  
  It was in the military schools of Prussia that the notion of dividing children into year-wise 'class' came about - it was a means of 'disciplined' learning leading to later military discipline, and offered a predictable means to knowing when a certain number of soldiers/officers would be available. 
  
  By putting all the children of the same age together and making them all learn the same thing over given periods, it seemed so organised, appealing, and management-friendly that the idea spread like wildfire. The practice is not very old, having originated (I think, but can't be sure at this time) in early 19th century. In about 120 years, it became so widely established that the it appears to most of us as the only valid mode of teaching children. It was also widely adopted by the church, which set up the earliest schools in most part of the world, in the wake of colonial powers. In some ways, the way the church was education - as preparation for later life of a certain kind - it was not very different form the military view. 
  
  In the military academy, the focus was not so much on education as on training. Conformity, cooperation, being at the same level as others was obviously highly needed for the kind of military that was emerging. With the growth of industrialization, this way of organising children into learning groups naturally became more common, as most of them were being prepared for certain limited forms of professions, where following instructions given the industrialist was the key expectation. The later use of assembly-line as a means of 'efficiency' served to re-inforce this further. People still talk proudly of themselves as being 'products' of certain institutions. (In the elite schools such as Eton or the Doon School in India, the real differentiation was - and is - outside the class in the range of activities to choose from, as well as the variety of subjects students could choose - such choice not being available to their less privileged peers. The tutorial system they use also provides a way to address the diversity of needs.)
  
  Not surprisingly, this same-size-fits-all approach has carried over in the name of preparing children to be citizens (following orders, being 'disciplined'), being social (listening to elders, obeying rules, not being different from others), and seeing themselves as the vehicles for fulfilling their 'superior's' wishes (which is why 'yours obediently' and 'please tell me what to do sir and I will do it' are considered highly desirable traits). Because this is convenient to adults/elders and those in positions of power, the myth continues

The Seven Myths of Highly Ineffective Education Systems – Myth # 1 of 7

Or

The Seven Myths That Make Education Difficult To Improve

Have you ever had the experience of failing to open a lock till you discovered that you were using the wrong key? That's a little like discovering after years or decades of work that perhaps some of the things we've been taking for granted all along don't necessarily hold true. There are probably many such notions, but here are what seem to be the seven most crucial ones. Each one of these is elaborated upon in a separate post, and followed by a note on what we can do - all over the next eight days.

The Seven Myths:

1. Children are homogenous

·      All must learn the same thing, in the same way, with the same material.
·      All must learn the same amount

If someone falls behind, something must be wrong with them – they don’t conform to the norm!

2. All children must attend school every day

3. There is one form of knowledge and it belongs to the ‘educated classes’.

4. Students learn mainly by listening to the teacher.

5. Teachers can improve by following instructions given to them by their seniors.

6. Stakeholders are concerned about education (as educationists understand it)

7. The education system exists to improve education.

Myth # 1 – Children are homogenous

·      All must learn the same thing, in the same way, with the same material.
·      All must learn the same amount

It’s quite amazing, isn’t it? What daily observation and commonsense (backed by vast, vast amounts of in-depth research) tells us is that children are very different from each other. That it is indeed difficult to expect all of them to learn the same amount in a year, that all ‘averages’ are mere guess work, certainly in terms of subject-related expectations after the early years. In fact, even the idea of putting children into classes or grades may not have sufficient basis – it is more management friendly than learning friendly. The question is not ‘How can the teacher teach if all children have to learn differently?’ but ‘How can naturally diverse children learn if the teacher teaches the same thing and in the same way to all?’

As a result of all this, if some children fall behind, it is assumed something must be wrong with them – they don’t conform to the norm! The ones falling behind are actually often those from under-resourced backgrounds – because the ‘norm’ and design of education is such that you are likely to do better if you are from an economically better background. Which is why it is actually news if a child from a poor family does well in a board exam!

And of course if you happen not to be able to learn the way in which you are being taught (you might be from a privileged family) even then something is wrong with you (though less wrong than if you were poor). You may not like school, but you can be sure the school does not like you too.

This myth is so common, so prevalent that it’s hard to imagine there might be other ways… what do you think?

Tomorrow, Myth # 2 of 7

The Real Issue With Tech In Ed

If doctors' interest and ability in diagnosing and helping patients improve were limited, if the medicines themselves were not always known to work, and if the patients didn't have much ability to pay - how much do you think 'tech' would work? Moreover, if 'tech' took over the mistakes usually made by teachers, it would work even less, isn't it?

This is what is happening in the case of 'technology in education'....

Vendors can be excused for touting their 'solutions' as real solutions - educators and decision-makers are the ones to be blamed for willingly falling into the trap of believing that technology will motivate teachers, overcome corruption, deal with the hierarchies that operate at the point of learning and perpetuate the hegemony of a few, tailor education to the needs and the experiences of the marginalized, solve the issue of huge and increasing diversity that teachers face, and overcome the indifference of the political / administrative establishment to poor educational performance.

A common finding in an analysis of most tech in ed efforts would likely show that after the initial enthusiasm and perhaps even use, the actual interaction / utilisation declines - eventually, it lies locked up or disused or misused (teachers use computers as a means of keeping children busy while they do something else). Sometimes a new wave of tech in ed displaces the old one but then neither end up making a sufficient difference.

It's not as if technology cannot make a difference, but it needs to be thought through differently. Usually, the thought process is - 'what can we do with tech'? This is like saying: 'now that we have a car, where should we go?' You might end up going somewhere you didn't want to go. Instead, the question should be - 'what do we desperately want to do / need to do (and why), in which technology can play a part?' Examples of this are relatively rare!