I changed school thrice between kindergarten and tenth. The majority of my schooling happened through two public schools (which are actually private, not government). Later in college, whenever friends shared their pasts and compared their accomplishments I always spoke highly of the first school. Even today I am biased towards it.
The first school was a tiny remote one and didn’t have a real playground. It was very good. I owe my basics to it. The teachers taught the textbook lessons and didn’t spoonfeed. The examination papers weren’t filled with stuff at the end of each lesson and we were free to answer them in our own words. All students were encouraged to participate in various extra-curricular activities.
The second school was comparatively famous and had a large playground. It wasn’t as good though. The majority of the teachers went through the textbook page after page and spent lots of time in having the students answer the questions and exercises at the end of each lesson often through dictation or copying from the blackboard. Examination papers only carried questions from those stuff with a new concept of choice, and answering questions on our own (without using the dictated answers) was frowned upon, in some cases even penalized if not punished. The teachers seemed to confuse between encouraging and forcing, which on the upside introduced me to the rebel in me.
Even though the first school didn’t spoonfeed, of late I have come to realize that that was not enough for me. There was so much more that I could have benefited from, some of which I am fortunate enough to have picked up from other sources.
Literature. The language textbooks had stories by Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain, essays by Sri Sri and Stephen Leacock, and poems by William Blake and John Keats. We read those stories and essays and poems, and the teachers did their best to explain them to us. But we never analyzed them, never dissected their merits and de-merits, nor discussed their significance. Heck, I reached college without even knowing the broad categories called fiction and non-fiction.
Sciences. Seeing blue-green algae under the microscope, and seeing the teacher measure the weight of sucrose under a sensitive balance more or less completed my lab experience. There are so many science experiments mentioned in the textbooks which need no specialized equipment, that we didn’t try.
Social Studies. We never took a moment to digest the atrocities committed by man over the history of mankind, never debated the populist policies of political parties, nor even compared the traffic rules in the textbook with the traffic sense of our parents.
Moral science. It was a vague free period in primary classes, and wasn’t really a science. That may be the reason why it was dropped as students gained seniority.
Whenever I see a classroom of a public school (not private, but government) in a Hollywood movie, it is a scene of active discussion. When the teacher is especially good, they even attempt to apply what they’ve learnt to the world outside. Good for them. I can only imagine what goes inside an Indian government school. Of course, even the Americans are crying out loud for school reforms.
The schools don’t sign an affidavit nor give any guarantees, but we have some expectations from them. I think that schools should not just prepare students to be tomorrow’s citizens but make them conscious of the human nature, that they should not just instill values but inculcate independent thinking, that they should broaden the horizons of the young minds. Making children dream of becoming doctors and engineers is less important than making them curious.
Our schools, however, are mostly interested in completing the syllabus, ensuring that their students perform well in the exams, and maintaining a good reputation. To add to the woes, the Indian education is not helping with its apparent extraordinary emphasis on math and science. It may be ultimately paving way to more engineering graduates who can be “absorbed” by MNCs, but education is not about employment and much less about improving literacy rates.