Our Nov 1987 cover

In the light of a startling new study exclusively made available to India Today, it is perhaps time to challenge these assumptions about how we teach our children. In one of the largest surveys of private school education ever undertaken in India, Wipro and Education Initiatives tested 32,000 schoolchildren from 142 schools across the five metros. The students were tested on Science, Maths and English, the aim being to test a student's genuine comprehension of a subject, not just the power of the memory.

Of the questions put to students, some judged their capacity to remember and others challenged their "adaptive thinking". This way, the study checked their understanding of a subject and their ability to apply that to life situations or to a query put slightly differently.

The findings from this study in a word are alarming. When questions taken from an international survey across schools in 43 countries, were put to Indian students of the same grade they scored below the international average. There was no connection between a school's facilities (extracurricular activities, computerisation) and the results turned in by their students. Even the most elite schools tended to lean towards rote learning as opposed to encouraging creativity.

The survey highlights many deep-rooted anomalies in our system of teaching. Rote learning is not harmful, but it provides incomplete education. In today's age, calculators do the multiplication and computers act as memory banks. What really count now are ideas and the application of knowledge to think out-of-the-box. Worryingly, for school boards, teachers and parents, India's best schools appear to be stuck in mechanical methods of imparting education.

By highlighting this survey on our cover, we want to provoke a debate about the standards of India's primary education and how it can be revamped. Instead of looking into the quality of our education and how to improve it, our vote-hungry politicians are obsessed only with reservation.

It is historically established that if a country has to graduate from being a developing country to a developed one, it must have total literacy and a high quality of education. As software czar Azim H. Premji whose education foundation jointly conducted the survey, says in his column: "If we want to transform India's destiny, we have to begin by changing what we teach and how we teach". I couldn't agree with him more.

Index