Who’s ever going to use this stuff ?

Credit: myfrea.com

I was doing what I usually doing…stalking random topics on Quora when I came across this question: India: Why is the overall quality of education in India so bad? and this answer by Mahesh Murthy.

Now, first of all, I am a huge fan of Mahesh Murthy. He was the first one who really gave me a clear understanding of what marketing was when he described the premium pricing strategy of Nike. However, I think his answer was quite random. I wouldn’t have bothered writing this post hadn’t been one of the lines in that answer:

That said, the content of most education globally is irrelevant. We rarely use Charles’ Law and Boyles’ Law in our daily lives but that’s what we are taught

While I disagree completely with that statement, what worries me is that there are way too many people with that kind of attitude towards the modern education system. Especially with the “why would I ever use it” attitude. So just thought I’d brain dump my way through why I think that’s the wrong question. I think we are basically, confusing various aspects. Hence, I think it makes sense to break the process into three parts:

1. The pedagogy or the process of teaching currently used by the current education system
2. The actual content of what is taught
3. The usability of what is taught

Now, I believe that the pedagogy is the part that most people have a problem with; the insistent focus on rote learning, high marks and a complete lack of interest from the teacher’s side. I don’t want to get into that now since that’s not relevant to the current argument.

Let’s go to the second point which in fact, is the direct target of Mahesh’s reply. Now, what I believe is this: when we were kids, most of us wanted to be fire fighters, engine drivers, astronauts and probably fairies (not in the context of the slang). Hell, I wanted to be Batman. When we started our physics classes on pressure and volume relationships, none of us even KNEW what we wanted in our lives. And that is PRECISELY what our education system tries to address. You didn’t KNOW that you didn’t want to be an engineer who designed IC engines or industrial boilers. You didn’t KNOW that you would never be a scientist who would try to make more efficient energy transfer systems. What the system tries to do is expose you to the most diverse fields available to you. It’s kind of like a funnel. The broad end is the part that lasts till the 10^th standard, giving the minimum exposure but maximum coverage. In the 11^th and 12^th, you focus on one particular stream, say Science, Commerce, Arts or Economics. Then, after two years, after you complete your science stream, you choose Engineering or Science and within each of these broad categories, a specialization for your Bachelor’s, a super specialization for your Master’s and so on. Hence, to call the content irrelevant at the primary school level makes no sense! The relevance or the irrelevance is completely dependent on the path you traverse as you move “down the funnel”

Which brings me to my third point. The usability aspect. While I have already talked about how the relevance of any one subject in school is dependent on the career path you take, there are also several indirect effects that are in play:

1.  For example, give the same problem to an engineer, an arts graduate and a chartered account. Each one of them will come out with a very different approach to solve the problem. One of them may not be able to do so. One will come out with the most elegant method to solve it. Why? Because even though certain stuff they learnt during their graduation may be irrelevant, I strongly believe your thought process is shaped on the career path you follow: Engineers follow a mathematical path, artists, probably through a non-linear one and CA’s through …. not really sure actually.
2. I, for one, have never believed that any knowledge is wasted. Learning the basics of refraction helped me appreciate sunsets more, the study of densities explained to me why people can float on the surface of the Dead Sea and how is electricity, which runs our every day lives, actually generated, transmitted and consumed. A curious mind is a prepared mind. It helps us cross the great chasms of various disciplines in a single leap. I read somewhere that the next level of creativity will come, not from within a discipline, but from principles adopted from non-related fields. How do we manage that then, if the breadth of our knowledge is so reduced? How do we strive to become the T-shaped individuals that Tom Kelly, the CEO of Ideo keeps talking about?

Frankly, I think it is even more important that we focus on increasing the span of our knowledge. In the hustle bustle of our careers, we miss out on the world that does not care for our profession. Seriously, how many of us read books that are far out of our “scope” to increase our horizons of what we know? We may not have the time or the inclination to do that now but atleast let us not super-specialize our kids.

Also, due to the paucity of time, I am probably not doing justice to the second part of his statement:

- and we’d be much better off if we were taught things like coping with peer pressure, being an entrepreneur and traveling on the cheap, for instance – things no one seems to do.

Right now, I can only say that not everything can be taught in the structure of the current educational system. Something needs to be taught by the world outside. Maybe the structure of an educational system can be modified to suit that purpose. But it doesn’t take away what is fundamentally required to really “educate” us.

Does it make sense to avoid giving scores/ grades in our primary education system?

One of my close friend’s mom was a teacher at a primary education school. She retired about 3 years back and now looks after her two adorable grandchildren. I met up with her when I was at Chennai and was talking to her about whether she missed teaching kids and her time at school. She was like “What teaching, Sam? There are no grades to be given, there are no tests, why should students learn?” The answer of learning out of interest died at the tip of my tongue. It’s true, isn’t it ? No pain no gain can actually be reversed to say if no gain, then why take pain?. Apparently, in her school, EACH student received a prize. We’ve seen this in Bombay too ! And the best argument for this:

“It’s a good initiative as it will weed out the fear of exams that most children have. Besides, the objective type questions for the tests will make children think rather than learn by rote,”

” Having no exam is a good move. It will be stress-free and periodic tests will help improve their attention span.”

Honestly, people I would love to believe this. I would love to believe that kids, using the current mode of pedagogy would love to learn, out of passion and curiosity, the intricacies of geographies or the heroics of history. But the fact is that, those are the kind of things that work only in the methodology of free schools such as those being established in New York. It also seems unfair to send kids into higher education with others from normal schools without any sense of competition, comparison or benchmarking. Hell. its like a hen walking into the fox’s den.

Secondly, I would be the first to agree that the current pressures of rote learning, excessive homework and more importantly, really bad SUPW (Defined as Social Useful Productive Work but actually means Student’s Ulcer, Parent’s Work or Some Useful Period Wasted) has its own problems. However, even if you think that kids are now learning only to get marks, now how can the absence of this pressure actually improve student’s knowledge and retention faculties? Till now, the only thing that happened was that kids memorized stuff because of the exams. But atleast, they knew SOMETHING. Now, they are effectively guaranteed to learn nothing because: 1) The marks don’t matter and 2) The subjects aren’t interesting. And now without ANY basic foundation of the sciences or arts, they are expected to get up to speed with the rest of the world?

I totally agree with the fact that education needs a serious reboot. It’s really fucking the kids up in its current avatar. But even then, getting rid of any serious attempt at evaluating their understanding of the fundamentals is crazy! And it’s the wrong place to start ! You first start with the teaching process. First of all, let’s get rid of the bullshit excuses. History, geography, science and math are not dull subjects. They are phenomenally interesting. The success of TV channels such as The History Channel, National Geographic, Animal Planet / Discovery and websites such as Khan Academy respectively are indicators of such interest. Why? Because they depict history as a study of the events, strategies, administration and politics – not of dates. They make geography as a study of different cultures, practices, climate, flora and fauna, not of types of soil and drawing scrawly lines on empty maps as rivers. That’s why. That’s how learning happens. Even trivia on these subjects make social gatherings so much more interesting. Brain sex baby ! In fact, even in Biology (one of my most hated subjects  – I lost my “fail” virginity to that damn subject!), there was a marked difference in the way my teacher taught it vs. the way my mom (A doctor) explained it to me. In fact, in explaining the renal system to me, my mom would bring in live cases about patients she treated and the impact of other non-renal problems as well. It made the whole thing a lot more lively. It made it a lot more learnable.

Now, if you establish a learning path that diverts from the rote process, then your examinations need to reflect the same. Exams need to allow teachers to judge the student’s ability to assimilate, digest and basically inculcate a smarter thinking process rather than whether he knows the derivation of differentiation of x^2. The exam should reflect, not just whether the student can solve the equation, but whether he can even frame it based on a real-world problem. The problem with this is that it requires a hell of a lot effort to set papers like this and that requires the teacher to be extremely competent. Competence demands authority, respect and money which unfortunately, is lacking in the teachers’ profession. However, getting into that aspect right now would divert from the point of this post so I won’t go there. But the fact is that, ONCE you have established this, then grading students, giving them marks and benchmarking them based on ranks is MANDATORY. It never stops being mandatory even now, IMHO, but even more so if you implement this process of learning.

The point I’m making is two-fold. Firstly, choosing between grades and no-grades is solving the wrong question. It doesn’t matter whether the answer to the question is right or not if we are choosing the wrong question to solve. It’s like answering a physics question in a chemistry paper. The funny part is the USA is trying to change their education system into focusing more on math and sciences to counter the “threat” from Indian and Chinese engineers and here we are trying to fuck up our own primary education system. My second point is that let’s understand the real world. It IS competitive, it IS brutal and it IS unfair. Trying to shield our kids out of this during their formative years will only delude them about the real world and destroy them once they get out into it. No one stops you from encouraging them to discover their own innate talents. I don’t prescribe to the  “Learn engineering because that’s where the jobs lie.” doctrine because I was subjected to it. But at the same time, I equally strongly believe that if you don’t strengthen your skills in the receptacle of competition and evaluation, you will never understand how good you are, what needs to be improved or your chances of standing out and succeeding in your endeavor.

Wow…just as I was writing this, another tweet from one of my friends:

@rohitawasthi

”The difference b/w school & life? In school, u’re taught a lesson & then given a test. In life, u’re given a test that teaches u a lesson.”

How do we deliver education to the rural people

WARNING: This is a brain dump. Haven’t really researched this in any way.

I was just going through Sanjay Swamy‘s tweets the other day and how he kept promoting ZipDial‘s product of giving a missed call to a particular number so as to vote for a specific poll. Won’t get into an analysis of the product since I’m not really sure of the model.

Anyways, I’ve been on this wierd drive today on education for rural people. Well, it’s been on my mind for some time while doing my MBA. However, at that time, I envisaged this fat pipe of bandwidth being hauled around the rural country and then content could be delivered through off-takes from this pipe. Yeah !! I can really be an idiot sometimes.

Anyways, was just mixing around these two ideas and was wondering whether a service delivery model could exist wherein people could dial up into toll-free numbers through IVRs to get daily lessons. The word “lessons” preclude the requirement of a structured syllabus and schedule but that is not where I am coming from. Nor am I talking about lessons taught as we are taught in schools. We are not talking about learning the A,B,Cs and the written word. But there is a lot of information that does not require the written word. It can be information on the impact of weather forecasts, how to read the soil, how to determine market information, benefits of insurance, etc. Practical snippets on everyday life that can be delivered verbally. Maybe even political news relevant to their area, financial benefits or even any compensatory entitlements that they may not be aware of.

Even lessons of the didactic nature can be in certain ways deployed over such a system if they do not require memorization of sorts. Obviously, subjects that require logical thinking and working out the problems such as math and physics cannot be taught on this platform. But history? Why not? Civics and political sciences, anybody? Maybe, if 3G does come in kicking doors with its sidekick – video, then why not through the Khan Academy of brilliant simplicity in teaching Math

Learning is about awareness not rote learning. It doesn’t try to substitute personalized teaching but seeks to accentuate it. In cases, where the personal contact is not available, it seeks to atleast remedy certain basic faults through quick fixes in the short term. The infrastructure exists: the rural telephony system works, so does the IVR technology (including the authentication aspects) and the toll-free model wherein the content provider pays for the calls made (the obv revenue model is ads but we have to see how that works). The part that still remains is the design of the product. Can it be done? Effectively enough given that you target only those specific subjects that can be delivered? Or are there just too many issues or not enough “subjects” that can be delivered on this model?

Check-ins as an attendance monitoring mechanism

Well, the concept of check-ins is not new. Simply put, you use a check-in in an LBS service (Location based services) to announce the location where you’re at. For example, you can “check-in” at a movie theatre and the status is updated on your Facebook and Twitter streams that you are currently at the theatre. A lot of interesting stuff is possible around check-ins but the best I think would be in the future in rural India where the attendance of kids would be marked by checking in into the school. Checking-in cannot be done unless you are at that location. Hence, using check-ins at schools  to track the progress of the children at school would be the best way to ensure attendance. Obviously, the frequency of the check-in can be determined previously (after every class, twice a day, once a day, etc.) Make the data public and you can really track which schools are working and which ones are not

TEDTalks – Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

This man is pure brilliance – Sir Ken Robinson talks about how education is stunting our ability to think creatively and critically. I have a lot to say about that. But nothing as close to what he says in his speech at TED. A must-watch below:

The TED page with comments here: Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity