The ongoing metacritique of the Indian education system—and it comprises an avalanche of aphoristic and brocardic critiques that will, in time, exceed Edward Gibbon’s magnum opus in length, breadth and depth—is taking everything into its purview: syllabuses, curriculums, design and methodology of examinations, government budgetary spending on education, mytho-historicisation, institutional de-sciencing, phraseology, macaronic texts (or formal code-switching).
India surely does not lack in the number or excellence of knowledgeable critics—nor of carping ‘criticasters’. However, what is missing from the common discourse are honest critiques of teaching, teacherisms and teachability. In short, pedagogy.
Trenchant criticisms of the National Education Policy, board exams, NEET, CUET and JEE need to be supplemented with anatomisation and appraisal of whether teachers are up to the vastly-responsible and endlessly-taxing task of tutelage, of informing young minds while retaining their pliability, of translating hardened words into ideas, of precision and interpretation.
When syllabuses are inadequate or warped, a trustworthy, well-grounded pedagogy can relieve the moral stress that underlies doctrina falsa, the teaching of the untrue. But do our teachers have it—or even the drive to teach that which is uncontroversial and included in schoolbooks, or to familiarise themselves with the contents of the studybooks, and to examine students on the basis of incontestable content?
Until and unless we ask this single question—“Are our teachers broadly capable?”—we will never arrive at a determination of exactly what is wrong with our education system, how deep the rot goes, whether it is rescuable, or if the whole shebang needs to be dumped cyclopaedically in toto and rebuilt from scratch.
The indications point to a ground-up builders’ approach, from toughening up pedagogical instruction to re-curriculating. Allow me to present two real-life examples of why both are imperative.
During a 10th-class half-yearly examination, this question was asked: “How does Antony’s agreement to execute his nephew, Publius, illustrate his political cunning?” The reference is to Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The problem is the question-setter’s unfamiliarity with the play. Mark Antony’s nephew, mentioned by relationship just once in the play, is never named. Publius is the name of two characters, an elderly senator present at Caesar’s assassination, and an exiled brother of one of the conspirators who asks for Caesar to pardon him.
In point of fact, 10th-class question papers—a test-run for the pre-boards later in the year, which are themselves gateways to the boards the following year—have been found to be riddled with errors. Students are kicked up from the spoon-feeding, rote-learning regime up to class 9 to graduate-level questions (tougher than those in the board exams) that demand analysis and lateral thinking—but the first in the language of the textbooks (which means a repeat of mugging), and the second disparaged as unorthodox despite being solicited through class advisories by teachers (which, in India’s monodirectional teaching system, should be read as orders, not guidelines, and even less as ‘dope’ on examination).
At the root of subpar teachership are substandard teacher training institutes. Both private and government-run teacher education colleges have low standards AND lack proper faculty—teachers themselves don’t have good teachers—or are unrecognised by the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), a statutory body set up under a 1993 law whose secretariat is located in the Department of Teacher Education, and the National Council of Educational Research and Training. That’s where the root of the rot is.
Decades ago, when tutelary pedagogy was still evolving in the country and opportunities for low-hanging diminution and shaving of rules were minimal because the only way was up, the Central Institute of Education (which was renamed the Department of Education in 1979 when it was amalgamated with Delhi University), was the flagship teachership institute in the country. Its founding in 1947 had been guided hands-on by Jawaharlal Nehru and his education minister, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.
As the authorities then saw it, teachership had to be governmentalised. Pedagogy had to be regulated. Far too many college professors, university faculty and schoolteachers had played a critical underground combative role during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. School, college and university authorities had become carriers of government propaganda overnight, advocating the necessity for the Emergency to impede the “foreign hand” and resist the enemies within.
After this brutality ended in March 1977, the authorities took more than two years to plan how to superintend academia, from school to university. The Department of Education was brought under Delhi University in December 1979, in the cusp of the anti-Indira Charan Singh government and the reascension of Indira Gandhi in January 1980.
But the killer of pedagogy in the country was the NCTE (Amendment) Bill, 2017, which amended the National Council for Teacher Education Act, 1993. The NCTE plans and coordinates the development of the teacher education system throughout the country, and ensures the maintenance of norms and standards.
When pedagogical standards fall, it is difficult to slow the speed of descent, leave alone halt it. The focus now seems to be on filling the more than one million schoolteacher vacancies, not much on quality.
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
