Some days ago, I was in conversation with a large group of schoolteachers drawn from various disciplines and institutions and I asked them the following three questions:
1. Mention the names of any books that you have read recently and which you have also discussed with your students.
2. Describe any truly innovative recent activity that you have engaged in with the help of AI and which your students have found engaging as well as rewarding.
3. Name three individuals from the pages of history in your specific disciplines whom you have deeply admired and give reasons for your assertions. Have you ever discussed these names with your students?
I was disappointed to learn that barring a small number of teachers the rest failed to give satisfactory responses to at least two of the three questions. In fact, a significant number of teachers did not have any worthwhile views on any of the three queries. The reason for highlighting this episode here is to bring to the fore the dearth of well-trained teachers in our schools.
The moot point that arises here requires delving into the reasons as to why the situation is so disappointing. If India does not wake up to this lacuna, then there is a serious possibility of the country paying a heavy price in the years ahead. One of the foremost reasons for the poor quality of our graduates is the fact that our students are rather inadequately mentored in schools. This rather worrisome practice continues all the way up to their university days. Despite so many commendable prescriptions in the National Education Policy, the situation at the ground level has not improved much. The average student suffers from an acute inability to think in original and creative ways.
A large number of students from their school days are subjected to the practice of rote learning. Add to this the burden of unimaginative testing that destroys whatever semblance of creativity that may have survived the onslaught of poor mentoring in the psyche of the average student. I say all this from my deeply disappointing firsthand and recent experiences with college students across many institutions. I find that they are unable to relate in any meaningful way with the disciplines that they study. For instance, when I engaged informally with a bunch of nearly 100 students of mathematics, I found that more than 90 of them had no insights or understanding of what they had been studying.
Most of them were focused on preparing for a written test for a clerical government job that had nothing to do with the exotic topics that had been heaped upon them. From among such students, the large numbers that fail to clear job related examinations then tend to gravitate to anything that shall help them stay afloat economically. To a significant extent the pool of schoolteachers tends to draw from among such graduates. It requires no feat of imagination to realise that such students are not likely to make enlightened schoolteachers. However, the situation can be retrieved somewhat if the teacher training programmes in several of our institutions had been of an imaginative kind. Alas, most teacher training programmes are rather counterproductive and unimaginative. I cite two reasons for such an assertion.
I have never really understood the heavy emphasis that is put in our B.Ed. programmes on training potential teachers to prepare detailed lesson plans for each of their lectures. To my mind this kills spontaneity and innovativeness. I also know of one of India’s more prestigious institutions of teacher training that has two major and distressing flaws. The first of these flaws deals with this institution’s refusal to have a liberal and open attitude in its doctoral studies programme. For instance, it refuses to admit the products of an innovative mathematics education programme from its very own university into its doctoral programme. Ironically, these very students find acceptance in the best universities abroad for doctoral programmes. The other thing that is quite worrying is that the quality and state of the school that this institution runs for training its B.Ed. students is abysmal. If the condition of its own ‘in-house’ high school is so dismal then what can we expect from its students who venture out into the real world?
Posts on X: @DineshSinghEDU