Teaching, Learning, Evaluation and Politics

The recent results of SSLC examination in Kerala did proud to everyone: Government, students, teachers and managements: a win-win situation in the modern jargon. Our children have performed an amazing forward leap in academic quality, thanks to the sincere effort of evaluators and policy makers who wielded the magic wand. It was the umpires who played this time to bring about such an incredible advancement by reducing the minimum requirements for a pass to ridiculously low levels. This act of charity enabled the lazy and dull to pass the exams and join the rest. It should now be possible to enhance the country’s prosperity overnight by bringing the “poverty-line” to similarly low levels. If the concerned agencies wake up to this task India will no longer be a poor country.

Education is concerned with acquisition of knowledge and skills. Evaluation is an essential and integral part of this process. More than anything else, evaluation should give valid feedback to the student as to whether he/she has scaled the requisite levels in the concerned subjects. At the end of the evaluation, if the teacher tells a lie the process simply becomes invalid. Somehow a sizeable population of teachers believe that they are empowered to award “marks” as a matter of gratis. Students and parents eagerly look forward to this largesse after every examination. Acceptance of this premise causes many factors other than academic to creep in and vitiate the system. We have witnessed several extremely degenerate cases where administrative bodies such as University Syndicates decide to award marks to chosen favorites for political reasons. We should realize that “mark” is a scale of measurement and not material wealth for distribution among the have-nots.

Education in India is hounded by two demons namely Degree Mania and Exam Phobia. Degree maniacs are typical cases of the society that crave the label and not the content. They want only the final gilt edged certificates, and are least bothered about what they learn, nor if they learn anything at all. Exam phobia is a quality inherited over generations: most students consider regular learning during the year/semester unnecessary and prepare for the short term target of passing the examinations. Thus all exams become fearfully difficult. This together with the basic distortion in the evaluation has relegated acquisition of knowledge as the last priority. Things have come to such a pass that learning and scholarship are hardly considered as of any value. To a large extent teachers are also responsible for such erosion in the fundamental objective of education.

It is time we realized that examination is a necessary evil, and that learning has to progress in spite of examinations, and not because of it. If the purpose of learning is to pass an examination, all that you learnt would evaporate immediately after. The residual knowledge (if any) is not usually good enough for higher studies or any profession. The student, on the other hand argues that there is no point in studying any Physics or Mathematics (except to pass the exams) if you are destined to end up as a clerk or bus conductor. The frightening element of truth in this argument traps the whole system in a vicious circle, because a majority of graduates in science, languages and literature have to take up jobs in stations totally alien to their subjects of study.

The policy makers who brought down the minimum requirement for pass in SSLC appear to endorse this line of argument as a short cut to popularity among the youth: Why should everyone know the congruence theorem of triangles and rules of grammar? Of course, it is true that in real life we are never asked to prove any theorem of geometry, nor do we have to recount the years of various dynasties and their wars. We teach all these, and compel the innocent student to learn everything, not because these bits of knowledge and information per se would assist them earn their daily bread. The children would in ten years “learn how to learn” through examples and stories, and face a test of understanding. Geometry and poetry are only training platforms to face a variety of intellectual challenges. The stories they learn may not be important, but certainly the culture of learning and scholarship are. It is in this context that there should be a reliable feedback system of telling the student how much he/she has learnt and how much more he has to. Telling them a lie at this stage is unfair.

Political and administrative authorities, in their blindness emanating from delusions of grandeur arrogate to themselves the right to donate marks as they please, blocking reliable feedback information and sending wrong signals to the student community that the days ahead are for the mediocre. Students will certainly take the cue and conclude that striving for excellence in learning is rather futile.