PSYCHOLOGY IN EDUCATION

Before we delve deep into our present discussion, let me first share a light moment with you and which, I feel confident, would cast a revealing light on the peculiar ways English is taught in most of the vernacular-medium schools in India and goes on recommending the possible ways we can improve upon the standard of the system of education as a whole in operation in this country. Others will find a lot in common with what I am going to tell in the following paragraphs. It was at the time of our tiffin break at school that I used to have several of my classmates sitting around me in the canteen and have a good time talking our heads off; one could put questions and others present answered them. It was one Saturday      before the summer vacation that Ananda proposed to hold a discussion on prepositions the following Monday and we agreed. On the given day Ananda came prepared and, to show he was a cut above the rest in the class, began elucidating from a page in his notebook; ‘a preposition is a word placed before a noun or pronoun to link it with the rest of the sentence. He sounded complacent as he said, ‘our assistant headmaster has been tutoring some of us for the last five months’. He urged us to follow his suit. Nil, the boy who loved wearing blue full sleeve shirts, took exception to this and advocated for his tutor to be the best perhaps in the entire world; ‘He is our class teacher, you know, he evaluates our answer sheets. He’d like me not to share his notes with others.’ I was all eyes to when he referred to ‘too’ as the past form of ‘to’ in the sentence ‘The patient is too weak to move’. The crowd nodded in appreciation as he was sharing information from his forbidden green notebook of Knowledge. I was a little reticent by nature, or I could have bragged in a similar fashion in support of my home tutor to have taught me with enthusiasm only the other morning an invaluable lesson on Gerunds, citing the expression ‘The girl came home dancing’ where ‘dancing’, he stressed, being a gerund. (Later I came to learn it was a present participle and not a gerund).It went hard with me as I had our class teachers teaching us English Grammar in the prescriptive way that comprised the inveterate presentation of the twelve tenses, voices, direct and indirect narrations, and a few other entries like the parts of speech without their gift of simulation. Instead of their insipid English lessons I used to indulge in looking out at the spectacular panorama of rice crops waving against the wind for no less than one fourth of a kilometre behind the school building, unless there was apprehension of this   composure being disturbed by some of our teachers, who made no bones about striking our foreheads against the rough walls. They invaded the wealthy classrooms and, after a period of depredations through shrieks and cries for half an hour or so, left it damaged, with our juvenile sentiments looted out―a penance if we fell behind to commit lessons to memory. This largely accounts for why some students chose practising truant besides their frail socio-cultural and economic backgrounds. These teachers never felt that effective education has connection with psychology; we must know the children before we can make remedy to their problems. All they taught by the term ‘prepositions’ was, in fact, a nebulous elaboration of a mixture of adverbs confused with prepositions that added up to why we learnt some of the basic functions of adverbs in classes dedicated to prepositions. They were like a bull in a china shop and couldn’t trace the distinguishable effect an adverb particle brings in placed after a verb. It is through my readings of foreign grammarians that I came to learn ‘on’ in the combination ‘put on’ is an adverb particle. Here some school goers may feel proud of doing a bunk from school. Things looked up as our Government had taken decision to nullify the invidious anathema (brutality in classrooms) and replace the older system of teaching students with a newer one dominated by a degree called B.Ed only to rest reliance on expediency with a marginal or no importance on ethics and morality. Students now have a lot to cheer about as they will be learning lessons freely; but the dry principles of B.Ed, that our Government consider  mandatory, stand like dams constructed on rivers to control waters flowing in or out end up engendering an arid scene of rivers running like narrow drains through rampant growth of weeds. Students are growing more and more defiant in terms of social etiquettes in disregard of their moral standards, since their preoccupation is only with a bookish or academic aspect in the teaching-learning process that doesn’t sets limits on the students’ freedom but restricts the teaches to be innovate in their own fields of activity. A garden offers a breath-taking view when the trees in it are planted in rows and get trimmed as they need the service done to them. I remember our college lecturer whose recitation of poems by Coleridge would take us along an aquatic inlet deep into the vegetative silence of a dark forest, bewitched into an eloquent tranquillity. He could enliven a topic even without being trained. A great majority of our honourable teachers who have already been garlanded with a B.Ed, a formal insignia emblematic of completeness in so far as we have made them, don’t appear to have anything but to rest on their laurels, since they have all reached the goal they once dreamt about. Here I’d like to have a look at the ‘Philosophy of Action’ Swami Vivekananda penned in Nineteenth century; ‘The whole universe is in fact the result of a struggle for freedom; from the insentient, lifeless particle of matter to the highest existence on earth, the human soul. It is for this freedom that the saint prays and the robber robs. The saint worships God to get rid of his condition of  bondage and the thief steals to get rid of his want  that he doesn’t  possess  certain things.’ Those teachers, I regret to say, lack this drive for their mission to encourage hope and love in the students they deal with in the class. Talking merely about skills and methodology is but half the story told; they must flourish nourished by resourcefulness to bring home to us our desired end to suggesting measures to reform our education system. When we conceive of our Modern Civilization as being advanced in every aspect of life, it is in fact the result of all the developmental processes men have gone through all the preceding ages. In the earliest stages of human civilization our predecessors used to hurl rough pieces of stone as a means of hunting animals. Their life was then very insecure. They grew skills through their wanderings from place to place in the heart of Nature, and there was a time when they passed from the food-gathering stage to the food producing one, with a noticeable change in respect of their stone tools beginning to be replaced by those made of the metals they came in touch with through their experience of Nature. No amount of skill was able to do justice to the idiom ‘To make an egg stand on its end’, as Mrs X defined it by citing a concocted story of a man who made efforts to make an egg stand on one end. Skill is the fragrance of intelligence that blooms on the twigs of knowledge growing on the rich soil of experience, strewn with manure of honesty and warm under the light from Psychology in an environment of discipline. TECHNOLOGY PLAYS A VITAL ROLE IN EDUCATION Before we move further, we must consider that the idea of education characterises a tri-pole constitution including students, teachers and the institutions, that’s why to reform education means to put reformation in each of these three heads. Our Government have taken a number of steps to draw more and more children, especially those from poor economic background, to schools: the fair ration of mead-day meals, books distributed free, and money offered to buy books or bear their upkeeps. We have also heard of some other measures they are going to have in the near future, still an increase in juvenile delinquency is a growing concern for our guardians. There are many cases of teachers playing second fiddle to obstreperous students and daren’t say anything to their face in fear of being harmed or humiliated by them. Too much liberty our students enjoy augers only in anarchy, disrupting the pure teaching-learning process. One occasion my teacher stressed the point; ‘You will never get anywhere working for yourself unless you have any discipline.’ As I am writing this article, Nalanda Mahavihara, dating back to third century B.C.and one of the world’s oldest universities, has been declared by the UNESCO to be a world heritage site. I have read times about this ancient establishment acclaimed as an important centre of learning, governed by monastic discipline. Students are our posterity, and it goes without saying the future of the human world rests with them. They attend schools not only for academic degrees but also for an invaluable lesson on social manners, customs, rituals, ethics and morality in order that they can accommodate themselves to the changes in society. Teachers must be resourceful and well prepared to rise to the occasion by means of their dedication to teaching. But unfortunately many schools that lie squeezed out of attention, especially in rural parts of this country, are adversely affected by low partisanship, desecrating the sanctity of teaching-learning process in schools. Teaching is a mission that require our teachers to go out of their ways to help students make progress in life, but the trespassing of a B.Ed degree, insinuating completeness, tends to send them to rest on their laurels. There are frequent cases of teachers drawn to private tuitions to serve personal interests, making little of the standards of teaching in the class room. A sensible question to ask is ‘Do we need a B.Ed at all?’ If we are to psychologise our education system and thereby reform our society, we must integrate Psychology in our syllabus at least from the secondary level so that each and every student without exception can have an essential grounding on this subject; we would never reach our goal with a few teachers maintaining the class based on the principles of a particular degree associated with Psychology and the rest in the class know nothing of it. We’d rather them help the teachers conduct the teaching-learning process in the class room. Even those, who are born of rich parents and educated in institutions of national or international repute in a city, you know, run a fair chance giving themselves up to the low tastes of social, political, cultural, or religious environments that can ride roughshod over their tender emotions. It is high time we took initiative to purge these sectors with the light of psychology which would rather play a broader role than just limit itself to a common set of mercenary rules for the teachers to follow in the class, with the vast part of human activities barred out. The teaching should preferably be practical in order that the discussion may get into the human nature to cast light on the dark corridors of human mind for the manifestation of a strong mind which would invariably be broadened by the study of those moral or ethical stories if the new school syllabus could integrate them in conformity with the growing needs of time.  Each of the subjects our teachers teach in the class must be treated with a practical side with a view to extend their benefits even to those who are going to represent other fields of activity besides being involved in teaching. Skill development programmes that our government have undertaken can play a significant role to deal successfully with the problem of massive unemployment in a country like India, characterized as one with a worker-surplus economy. MODEL SET HERE IS OF AN IDEAL CLASS-ROOM WITH  THE TEACHER &  THE STUDENTS ACTIVELY INVOLVED Psychology finds a practical representation across classrooms, with the teacher-student ratio standing at 1:30 or below it, champions the cause of our students, especially those from poor economic background, who find themselves hard put to it to lose another two vital years and a huge sum of money in exchange for the so-called ‘Bachelor of Education’(B.Ed) which, although it is guided by Psychology to suggest measures to promote the welfare of our students for a better future, can’t cut the Gordian knot as it gives a wide berth to the cause of the great majority of people living in the society. A general examination conducted for fresh recruits of teachers must be of an analytical type to judge the analytical potential of our teachers (So far as the teaching of English is concerned; teachers should be more careful about the line of demarcation between English Language and its counterpart English Literature). To remain actively involved our teachers should go in for an efficiency test at the end of a given period of time much in the way our students have to take an exam on the expiry of every academic session. Our honourable teachers can participate in the work-shops or piggy back on different articles published at different times if they think they need a bit more information about maintaining discipline in the class room to create an ideal ambience for teaching students. However, we must give countenance to teachers being felicitated in recognition of their achievements not only to pay respect to them but also to encourage those who would like to teach in the future. Teachers are heckled by mischievous students shouting out rude remarks at them must be eliminated from the school premises. With the teachers and their students now actively involved in the teaching-learning process in classrooms we can now dream about the bright future of mankind. ALL YOU NEED IS THE WILL AND NOTHING ELSE