Dr. Shekhar P. Seshadri, professor, NIMHANS, Bangalore with Prof. Anitha Kurup & R. Maithreyi, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore

“…But a failure to equip minds with the skills for understanding and feeling and acting in the cultural world is not simply underscoring a pedagogical zero. It risks creating alienation, defiance, and practical incompetence. And all these under-mine the viability of a culture.” Jerome Bruner — The Culture of Education (1996)

The latest Quality Education Study (QES, 2011) conducted by Wipro and Educational Initiatives, not only shows cognitive underachievement but also reveals the presence of disturbing social attitudes among students of India’s top metro schools (EW February), which seem to confirm the predictions made by Bruner.

Not only does QES 2011 indicate that academic outcomes within India’s best schools are poor, it also highlights a great shortfall in personal and social knowledge and skills, which has grave implications for the formation of a responsible and mature citizenry. The survey results show that early learners harbour deep-seated gender prejudices (close to 43 percent of students in classes IV, VI, and VIII opined that education for girls is not as important as “family responsibilities”, with a few stating that it is a waste of family resources). Intolerance for diversity is also cited by the survey with nearly 60 percent of students expressing intolerance towards ‘immigrants’ from other states of the Indian Union, and 50 percent opining that it’s permissible for religious differences to be defended by violence. Moreover top private school students lack sensitivity towards the differently-abled (between 70-80 percent believed they are burdensome, unhappy and poor at studies). These regressive attitudes come as no surprise.

This is because, as the study details, schools seem to prepare children for mastering skills for imitation and reproduction of procedural knowledge through rote memorisation. In the absence of skills for critical thinking and reflection to engage with social and political issues, they perhaps also apply rote learning techniques to the social domain, and thus imitate and reproduce prevalent socio-cultural prejudices. Critiquing this lacuna in primary-secondary education, the National Curriculum Framework, 2005 (NCF) observed that “education often plays a passive or even insidious role, allowing young minds to be indoctrinated into a culture of intolerance, which denies the fundamental importance of human sentiments and the noble truths discovered by different civilisations”.

The QES study stands testimony to this as it lays bare the disconnect between the elementary education curricula — even in top-ranked metro schools — and other social sectors such as economy, caste/class, culture, religion and more importantly, family.

Read together, the conclusions of QES 2011 seem to suggest that the guidelines and directions provided by NCF and other education policy initiatives beginning from the Kothari Commission (1966), are yet to be implemented in elementary education. NCF has clearly stressed the need for schooling to become more meaningful, personally relevant and socially productive through a definitive shift from rote learning and memory-based pedagogies to learning connected with wider societies beyond school gates. It argues that teaching-learning processes must focus on the overall development of children and must inspire respect for a democratic polity.

According to social anthropologist and learning theorist Jean Lave, learning has to be viewed as a process of “identity-making” by which children and youth absorb the cultural nuances of their environment. Likewise, according to Tara Fenwick, professor of education at the University of Stirling, learning should be seen as the process of “meaning-making” through participation, collaboration, negotiation and reflection. This approach rejects the view that schooling or education is about accumulating procedural knowledge or large volumes of information.

Instead, knowledge is understood to be co-produced within a context influenced by the actions of learners, teachers, as well as the material. Therefore, it involves the processes of critical thinking, feeling, analysing, applying and reflecting. The learner and the teacher engage in these processes to further learning, based on the previous level achieved by the child through dialogue. The continuous process of action and reflection to enhance knowledge thus renders evaluation more sensitive to the child’s gradually increasing expertise and understanding, rather than emphasising one exit outcome such as examinations which focus only on memorisation and facts accumulation. Through this process, students can question dominant prejudices taken for granted and become more sensitive to inequalities and injustices within society. Moreover through the process of problem-posing and reflection, they become equipped to identify gaps in their own knowledge and engage in creative thinking which can be useful not only for overcoming social inequities and prejudices, but also for innovation which is the prerequisite of scientific progress.

The value of the QES study is that it highlights the need to shift away from an outcomes-based view of education, to education as a process of engaging students in the processes of critical thinking and transformation.

Also read: New Pedagogies Changing Indian Education