One of the horrors of the Indian education system is its excessive reliance on text books and the examiners' need for students to regurgitate the written matter without expending any effort in trying to imagine how the same can be applied to real situations to either change, recreate, amend, dire circumstances or a crisis. We study about historic invasions, about the grandeur of Chola temple architecture, about sound patterns, about labelling parts of a leaf, about law of diminishing returns, about wretched Shylock demanding his pound of flesh, with little understanding of why each of these are momentous concepts, whose understanding can help us create noise free urban spaces, or teach us to be a bit more tolerant when that new neighbour moves in, or the origins of organic chemistry. However, our children have not been trained in this. Instead, they are expected to reproduce keywords and large chunks from paragraphs that have been endlessly highlighted in fluorescent markers. I don’t resent the marker pens though – nothing like a new market set-of-5 to motivate your 10-yr old to open and browse through the textbook !
The text book is perhaps the most reviled and desecrated
object in the Indian education system. It is rewritten not to accommodate man’s
evolution and discovery of newer scientific or social facts or even their probability. It is changed in accordance
with the ideological/unscientific biases of the ruling dispensation.
After the academic year, it is sold to raddiwalas
to be made into bhel sachets and
paper pouches. Students don’t refer to
the textbook to learn, but to secure marks.
During a course i attended at IIM Ahmedabad , I encountered texts of a different kind – ones
which I looked forward to and stimulated the mind. We were given a small bag
full of reading material on diverse topics such as leadership essentials, improving supply chain stability, product pricing strategy. Since this was a short course, there were no text books and all the topics were covered via case studies. The liveliness and diversity of opinion in the classroom was infectious and memorable. One wrote down sudden thoughts that surged rather than highlighting large swathes of the case study.
