Exam-oriented education as a spirit-deadening machine

David Vumlallian Zou

Educational reform in all sectors in Manipur is a concern that desperately calls for serious public attention. Like many of us, I too survived the cramming schools of Manipur. As far as I remember, critical literacy was never part of the agenda in the schools I had attended. Teachers expected us to cram, but most even failed to cram. In one sense, I appreciate those who resist the oppressive education system by refusing to cram.

No wonder more than half of the candidates (58.75%) in the previous year's secondary school results were declared “failed”. Our young students are labelled as “failures” at a critical juncture of their academic career. It is frightening how such youngsters will cope with the negative tag received at such an impressionable age. This is a tragic waste of gifted human beings! This reminded me of Edward Shils’ characterization of Indian colleges as “a spirit-deadening machine”. Since Shils made this remark in 1961, things had improved a lot in mainstream Indian education. But not yet in Manipur.

Students depend on rote memory rather than critical understanding of problems and concepts. There is no opportunity to learn new problem-solving skills to meet the challenges posed by our modern complex society. Both teachers and students are oriented towards the end-term examination. Throughout the academic year, teachers and students are busy with non-academic pursuits or headline-seeking arsonist activities. Student unrest is a symptom of the educational system’s inability to engage our students in pursuits which are intellectually and socially profitable. Intensive academic activities are usually postponed till the very last month before the examinations. In this context, study means cramming class notes and bazaar notes. Many students often actually manage to graduate without ever reading a single authoritative textbook. Good luck to them!

While educational assessment is not only necessary, but highly desirable, I think our present system of end-term exam system is incompatible with our goal of democracy and social justice. The terminal exam system inevitably promotes the home tuition system, where the teacher becomes a money-making machine who can deposit some facts into the heads of students to clear the examination hurdle. If the outright abolition of this necessary evil is impracticable, we can at least reduce its weight by partly replacing with more imaginative assessment of students on the basis of group projects, open book examination, tutorial discussion and presentation, book review, literature review of select topics, etc. In other words, this would involved a deep reform of our present outdated pedagogic practice by shifting to the Module or Semester System. While TDC and 10+2 are ideal levels to introduce the reform, secondary schools may be incorporated into the new system as soon as they are ready. This will, of course, require some teacher training for its effective implementation. An intensive refresher course for teachers on such new assessment policy is not an impossible goal to achieve. Fortunately, there are abundant Internet resources today for teacher trainers and for practicing teachers. The publication of a Teachers Magazine may also go a long way in fruitful exchange of ideas and skills between educationists and enterprising teachers within and outside the state of Manipur. While the state can facilitate financially the formation of such a magazine, it is desirable that this should be initiated and managed by the teachers themselves.

Professional training of teachers was kept under the cold shade of neglect, especially in private institutions. Even if ITC literacy may be still beyond the means of most educational institutions in Manipur, it is certainly possible to impart teacher training in innovative and critical pedagogy. While syllabus and teaching badly needs to be student-oriented, we can go a step ahead by making them student-initiated. In order to integrate a critical component to student learning, both teachers and students should have some say in the formulation of their syllabus. Students should take the responsibility for their own learning. In other words, self-reflective learning is the watchword. In many Western educational institutions, this is encouraged by maintaining a Personal Development Profile (PDP) by each student and assessed by a tutor at the end of the Module.

At presents, many of our teachers are not just unqualified and untrained; they are overburdened with their work loads of teaching, or rather dictating “sacred” class notes to be memorized by passive learners. There is no place for any interactive and reflective learning like group discussion, project work, library tour, field work, presentation, demonstration, exhibition, open dialogue, role play, mock interview, poster workshop, budding reading, oral history project, etc. Though I graduated with a research degree in historical studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, I still remember how I hated reading history when I was a high school student in Manipur. The history textbooks for class IX and X we read were unimaginative and densely factual narratives. It was a crammer’s paradise. It involved mind-boggling marshalling of chronological facts without a clear historical perspective! Besides the unreadable style and dry language of the text, the delivery method of the history teacher was also faulty. Teachers insisted on rote memorization of only the expected questions for the exams. (This largely applied for other subjects too). No wonder I never appreciated the value of history till I actually read, much later, the works of Romila Thapar and Bipan Chandra during my studies in Shillong.

At present, our education system promotes authoritarianism and patriarchal values. Corporal punishment is still followed in most schools. A good discipline should not turn against, but offer help and counselling, to difficult students. Both the syllabus and pedagogic methods actively discourage critical consciousness and creative thinking. This only perpetuates the status quo. Our ruling class is understandably no fan of critical literacy. Our education system has been manufacturing graduates with little or no critical consciousness, civic competence, innovative ideas and employable skills. We failed to produce enlightened citizens who can appreciate the complexities of living in a multi-ethnic society like ours. In a changing global order, our students are appalling ignorant, for instance, of the rise of China and India. So, we are yet to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by the new investment climate. Our inward-looking worldview and dependency mentality inhabit us from building an open and “intelligent society” which will attract investors! Though we are in the 21st century, we are still clinging to medieval and patriarchal values.

In short, we need to do something to our existing system of “banking education”, as Paulo Freire puts it in his classic book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1993). Banking education assumes that teachers can deposit facts into the heads of students like a bank deposit which can later be cashed in by the students. In the words of Freire himself, “Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers … Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence”. We need to start opening our educational system to the most innovative ways of framing syllabus and pedagogic practices. The sooner the better! We need to impart news skills to our youth to meet the challenges facing the world today. It is a high time to give up our exam-oriented and bookish model for a new interactive and critical pedagogy. For this, the first step may be to start identifying and networking our most innovative and enterprising teachers, our “edu-preneurs”. The recent Seminar at JN Manipur Dance Academy, Imphal, was a move in the right direction.