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.
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.
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.
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