Exams and suicides

My colleague Rohit Dhankar has an essay in today's The Hindu called "Staying power of the pass-fail system". It gives a historical and sociocultural perspective on why examinations dominate our education system. Here is one of his conclusions:

But it seems that the biggest force behind the persistence of this curse [of a] useless examination system is a social one which is grossly under-examined. We are a caste-based and strictly hierarchical society. In earlier times, this hierarchy had the iron-clad stability of the caste system. That determined the place, function, work and life of an Indian even before his/her birth. There are attempts now, which range from constitutional rights to political struggle, to break that mould. It may not have been dismantled yet, but is under tremendous pressure ever since the freedom movement began.

But social hierarchies involve privileges, prestige and goods of life that are cherished by all. [No one] is ready to let go of the privileges one has. As a result... attempts to maintain the old hierarchy as well as...  ways to challenge it look toward education. Education, therefore, becomes a means of fierce competition either to remain in one’s position of privilege or to rise in the hierarchy. It completely stops being a self-motivated way of forming an authentic self and gaining an understanding of the world, and is reduced to a means to beat/best the neighbour. A more open and thoughtful system of education will challenge the hierarchies which are so dear to a caste-minded Indian. The result is that the authoritarian system of pass-fail stays.

The months of March through June in India are fraught with news reports of students commiting suicide because of the examination system. "When will we ever learn?" asks an anguished teacher Devi Kar. As she chillingly says of our suicides: "Our children are usually found hanging from ceiling fans."

Dhankar's essay (also available on his bilingual blog Thinking Aloud) notes: "There is no commission or committee report after Independence which does not acknowledge the burden of rote learning and the examination system on its students and its futility in assessing their real abilities." In fact, a decade ago, the magazine India Today told us several heart-rending stories about these "Killer Exams". It concluded by suggesting the following measures:

• Instead of one-shot terminals, exams would be staggered over two semesters to ease pressure.
• Evaluations would be a mix of internal and external. No sprinting through answer papers.
• Restricting the number of pre-board exams and possibly banning them altogether.
• A combination of multiple choice and traditional questions to test understanding and broad skills and not just memory.
• No more failures in the new grading system being evolved

A decade later in 2016, we seem to be no better in stopping our children from killing themselves because of the examination system.

Education in Bihar - challenges

Following up on the Bihar Report which I'd blogged about in February, here is Rukmini Banerji's excellent essay "Challenging Bihar on Primary Education" (PDF) in EPW (12-18 March 2011). The style she adopts is an engaging one of analysis interspersed with anecdotal raportage.

Like the other report, she too readily acknowledges the strides the state has made: "It is evident that there has been a massive infusion of inputs into the system at a very fast pace. Government expenditure on elementary education has increased enormously, basic educational indicators like access and enrolment are rising and the student-teacher ratios are becoming more favourable." But is that enough? Is it resulting in better educational outcomes? Not yet, she says. And a big part of the problem is that the teachers themselves seem to be inadequately trained.

"The findings from the language tasks completed by teachers are equally sobering: less than 50% of teachers could meaningfully summarise a Standard 5 level text. Four difficult words from the Standard 4 level text were selected and teachers were asked to write the meaning of each word in simple language. Less than 50% of surveyed teachers could do this task correctly. When asked to write a few sentences, the teachers made several spelling mistakes."

She concludes:

"What do we see for primary education in the state in the future? There are massive challenges: there is political will at the top and there are aspirations and demands from below. It is the middle of the delivery system that is rusted and needs overhauling and repair. The need is to understand the nature of the rust in the system. Incentives need to be aligned to interests so that we see initiative and energy inside the system. Schools are being built, children's enrolment is rising, teachers are coming in but these must translate effectively into changed behaviours if they are to lead to big improvements in children’s attendance and substantive increases in learning levels."

English from class 1 in Andhra Pradesh

A somewhat alarming February-2011 report in Deccan Chronicle - "English medium proposed in all government schools" - has morphed into a March-25th report - "AP schools to teach English from Class 1". Let us hope that the latter report is not a preliminary to implementing the February announcement. It is fine to "introduce English as a second language from Class 1 in all government schools... from 2011-2012". (It is now being taught from class 6.) But introducing English as a medium of instruction is a bad idea. Here's why.

The state's education system finds it difficult enough to impart education in the mother-tongue. The state's performance in the ASER survey is fairly dismal:

• only 60.3% of class 5 children (~ 11-year-olds) can read a class 2 text; nearly 40% cannot.
• of class 5 children, 18.3% can recognize the numbers 11-99, but cannot do subtraction; 37.7% can subtract, but not do division; 40.5% of class 5 children can divide. Nearly 60% cannot.

Nor is the situation in private schools much better. ASER reports that between 2007-2010, in private schools, some 5-10% more children have been able to do the reading and arithmetic tasks mentioned above.

And all this is in the mother-tongue, Telugu.

(As in other parts of India, in AP too, indigenous/tribal and minority children get only the dominant regional language - in AP's case, Telugu - as the medium of education, except for the small fraction that can afford to send children to an "English-medium" school. Combined with all the other systemic problems, education in a non-mother-tongue results nation-wide in a third of the enrolled children being "pushed-out" before class 5. And in AP, within the first 10 years of schooling, 82% of indigenous children leave school. References in my 2010 paper in Languaging.)

To come back to private schools in AP, their only-slightly better performance hasn't stopped parents from choosing them. As ASER reports, "Between 2009 and 2010, the percentage of children (age 6-14) enrolled in private school has increased from 29.7% to 36.1% in Andhra Pradesh."

The March-2011 report in Deccan Chronicle gives even more disquieting figures: "the percentage of enrolment... in government schools... came down... from 82.48 to 55.72 [percent] in primary and upper-primary schools, while private school enrolment increased from 17.52 to 44.28 percent... [between] 1995-96 and 2009-10."

With the quality of education in Telugu being what it is, introducing English as a second language is hardly likely to make much of a difference. And making English the medium of instruction is likely to prove disastrous.

Social Scientist issue on education in India

The current issue of Social Scientist (Sep-Dec 2010; vol. 38, no. 9-12) has some excellent articles on the current state and future of school and higher education in India. Together, these essays constitute a powerful critique of the recent and forthcoming education "reforms" in the country.

As Prabhat Patnaik argues in the Editorial: "education is being transformed into a commodity, like automobiles or washing machines, that will be produced by capitalists for profit and bought by those who can afford it."

If these analyses (see Contents below) are accurate - the arguments are certainly cogent and forceful - then we as a society are headed for some very bad times indeed.

On the subject of language, Anil Sadgopal (whom we've met before in this blog), in his thorough-going critique of the Right to Education Act (RTE), considers "The question of mother-tongue and multi-linguality":

"The knee-jerk policy response assumes that learning of 'good' English is best achieved through English medium schools, starting from nursery or kindergarten stage upwards to higher education.... This policy discourse also ignores the global research that reinforces the powerful pedagogic role played by the mother tongue as part of the multi-linguality (this may include English too) of the majority of the children in plural societies like ours in acquiring subject knowledge as well as learning languages other than one's mother tongue....

"The consequence of this misconception and lack of a sound policy is the widespread phenomenon of a rapid attrition of the capacity to articulate one's thoughts or ideas. The vast majority of the Indian children grow up in the prevailing multi-layered school system without acquiring the capacity to learn and articulate in either the state language or English and, in the process, losing the capacity to do so in one's mother tongue as well."

As I've blogged earlier, RTE includes the following opt-out: "medium of instructions [sic!] shall, as far as practicable, be in child's mother tongue".



Contents

1. Editorial Prabhat Patnaik
2. "Towards Democratization of Education in India" Amiya Kumar Bagchi
3. "Right to Education vs. Right to Education Act" Anil Sadgopal
4. "Education and the Politics of Capital" Ravi Kumar
5. "Policy Crisis in Higher Education: Reform or Deform?" B G Tilak
6. "UPA's Agenda of Academic 'Reforms'" Vijender Sharma
7. "Advantage In-bound Trade in Higher Education, or Advantage Human Capital in Out-bound Trade" Binod Khadria
8. "Governance of Indian Higher Education: An Alternate Proposal" Dinesh Abrol
9. "Commentary: Science Education" S. Chatterjee
10. "Obituary: Tapas Majumdar" Prabhat Patnaik

Dismal schooling in Rajasthan

In the Sunday Magazine of The Hindu, yet another depressing article on primary schooling in India. Filmmaker Umesh Aggarwal's new film "Divided Colours of a Nation" takes us, as Kalpana Sharma tells us,

to a rural school in Barmer, Rajasthan. There are just two teachers for five classes. One of them is also the principal. On the day the filmmaker goes to the school, neither of the two teachers is present and only 25 out of the 188 students are at school. Not far away in a Bhil village, he goes to a government school. There are 90 students in Standards I to V but only one teacher. Yet another school on the Indo-Pak border in Rajasthan is deserted at 12.30 p.m. There are no children and the only teacher has been missing for eight days. Little wonder then that 50 per cent of students in Rajasthan have failed the Standard 10 examination in the last 10 years.

While this is the situation in distant villages, things were not very different in a government school not far from the national capital. Here, there were 18 classes, but nine had no teachers. Half way through the term, the children still had not received their textbooks.

I wonder what language the Bhil children were being taught in. Probably Rajasthani (or one of the langauges of that cluster). Almost certainly, the medium of instruction was not Bhili - or any of the related languages of the Bhil language group. The 2001 census tells us that there are 9.58 million speakers of Bhili. And Ethnologue reports: "Literacy rate in first language: 1% to 5%. Literacy rate in second language: 10%."