On a bright and sunny day, the six year old Shiuli jumped out of the school bus and ran into the arms of her Mother. She enthusiastically handed her Annual Report to her mother and said: “Mummy look, I will now go to class two (Standard/Level two of Primary School)! I am a big girl now!” Shiuli’s Mother kissed her and absorbed the contents of the Report Card. She looked at Shiuli and said, “Dear, you have stood second in your class, then who stood first in your class?” To this, Shiuli innocently replied, “Kakoli got No. One position, but Mummy, she has got only One while I have got Two and Madhavi has got Thirty, which is more than what I got, then why Teacher said that she cannot go to class two with us?”
Henceforth, it became an unwritten rule for Shiuli to mention her position in the class while handing her progress report to her Mother. It was yet another Final Examination Report declaration day and Shiuli was to collect report of her year-long progress in Sixth standard. She went to school with her friend Tulsi and her Mother. When Shiuli received her report card, she first checked was her rank in the class. She then hurried out of the school compound to find Tulsi’s Mother waiting for them, who smiled at Shiuli and took her in her arms. At this loving gesture Shiuli blurted out, “Mashi (Maternal Aunt), I have stood sixth in the class, I don’t know whether Mummy will be happy or not.” In reply Tulsi’s Mother held Shiuli close to her and reassuringly replied, “My dear daughter, you have cleared the exam and that’s all that matters, not the position you have attained in the class.”
While reminiscing her experience as a student Shiuli, who now is a mother of young girl herself, has these questions that she is still trying to answer: We are community beings but, does our marks and competition oriented education system help an individual to be fully aware of ones own potential and how to harness it to ones own benefit and that of the community? Is our education system geared up to prepare automatons and not enlightened individuals adequately prepared to co-exist in the society and not treat anyone and everyone as a contender one needs to compete with to improve ones own existence? Our Straight-jacketing form of education system begins the ordeal of tension and stress from our very childhood and the rat-race like existence that makes an individual prematurely burn out through undue stress and strain caused by the very misconception of “Struggle for Existence” and “Survival of the Fittest” within the community, when community animals like elephants, ants, lions et al have proved it wrong through their community existence where they co-exist and not out-perform each other within the community. Education system should be a prop or chains to fetter down an individual and smother his/her creative potential? Do the parents and teachers have to educate the children through comparative analysis and invariably fail to identify the true potential of a child?
Pramila Mohanty, who is a Computer Science Teacher in a High School in Orissa, narrated her experience as a teacher:
While helping the students of Class Nine and Ten with their Computer Project and Practical Evaluation as part of the Board Exams, she used to team them up with three students in each team. While teaming the students she used to keep above average, average and a slow learner in each team and make sure that none of them were good friends, so that it would be a chance for them to get to know each other too. She used to mark them on their intra-personal (within the team) and inter-personal (with other teams) skills and all the students were aware of it. The students were also aware of being graded on their performance, so the question of vying with each other for marks did not arise. The students were encouraged to pick up a topic for the computation project either from any of the subjects they were studying in school or from their everyday life or of any commercial scenario. No two teams could work on identical topics.
It was an external evaluation day for Class Ten students and just an hour before the arrival of the external Examiner, a team realised that it had lost the program code of its project it had saved on a computer system in the computer lab. Before Pramila could find a solution (of approaching the External Examiner, who had been handed over the floppy disk of the codes that were to be verified with the one in the computer systems allotted to the teams, and requesting for some more time to recover the code), all the students of the batch had already volunteered to type the code manually documented by the members of the team and then to compile it and hand it over to the team. The students achieved this herculean task within the hour of arrival of the Examiner!
Pramila too has the following questions in mind: Why do we have to have marks scoring system of education? Does it help us to know whether the one who has secured the highest marks in all the subjects has developed into a good human being too? We say that education means over all development of a human being but in the present system of education are we also giving due attention to the health (physical and mental) health of the students, their personality development? How well equipped is the education in developing the skill of an individual according to ones aptitude, that will eventually help one to develop into a successful professional? When will the education system help the parents to think out of the box and stop pressurizing their wards to become an engineer or a doctor, etc and allow her/him to pave their own path in life?
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