Dr. Shekhar P. Seshadri, professor, NIMHANS, Bangalore with Prof. Anitha Kurup & R. Maithreyi, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore “…But a failure to equip minds with the skills for understanding and feeling and acting in the cultural world is not simply underscoring a pedagogical zero. It risks creating alienation, defiance, and practical incompetence. And all these under-mine the viability of a culture.” Jerome Bruner — The Culture of Education (1996) The latest Quality Education Study (QES, 2011) conducted by Wipro and Educational Initiatives, not only shows cognitive underachievement but also reveals the presence of disturbing social attitudes among students of India’s top metro schools (EW February), which seem to confirm the predictions made by Bruner. Not only does QES 2011 indicate that academic outcomes within India’s best schools are poor, it also highlights a great shortfall in personal and social knowledge and skills, which has grave implications for the formation of a responsible and mature citizenry. The survey results show that early learners harbour deep-seated gender prejudices (close to 43 percent of students in classes IV, VI, and VIII opined that education for girls is not as important as “family responsibilities”, with a few stating that it is a waste of family resources). Intolerance for diversity is also cited by the survey with nearly 60 percent of students expressing intolerance towards ‘immigrants’ from other states of the Indian Union, and 50 percent opining that it’s permissible for religious differences to be defended by violence. Moreover top private school students lack sensitivity towards the differently-abled (between 70-80 percent believed they are burdensome, unhappy and poor at studies). These regressive attitudes come as no surprise. This is because, as the study details, schools seem to prepare children for mastering skills for imitation and reproduction of procedural knowledge through rote memorisation. In the absence of skills for critical thinking and reflection to engage with social and political issues, they perhaps also apply rote learning techniques to the social domain, and thus imitate and reproduce prevalent socio-cultural prejudices. Critiquing this lacuna in primary-secondary education, the National Curriculum Framework, 2005 (NCF) observed that “education often plays a passive or even insidious role, allowing young minds to be indoctrinated into a culture of intolerance, which denies the fundamental importance of human sentiments and the noble truths discovered by different civilisations”. The QES study stands testimony to this as it lays bare the disconnect between the elementary education curricula — even in top-ranked metro schools — and other social sectors such as economy, caste/class, culture, religion and more importantly, family. Read together, the conclusions of QES 2011 seem to suggest that the guidelines and directions provided by NCF and other education policy initiatives beginning from the Kothari Commission (1966), are yet to be implemented in elementary education. NCF has clearly stressed the need for schooling to become more meaningful, personally relevant and socially productive through a definitive shift from rote learning and memory-based pedagogies to learning connected with wider societies beyond school gates. It argues that teaching-learning processes must focus on the…
