By Rahul Panda
The HRD ministry?s decision to not give the triennial PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2012 test, conducted by the OECD, a go by citing reasons that the standardised questions aren?t relevant to our socio-cultural backgrounds should not surprise anyone. It?s an application, at the highest possible level, of the ‘naach na jane aangan theda’?idiom that students rote-learn in Hindi classes across the country. Or perhaps the ministry ? in its good sense or the lack thereof ? deems this to be a good way of concealing another ugly blot on the already sullied image of ?India shining?. Maybe, the embattled government does not want to provide more arsenals to an opposition which is already grilling it over coal fire. Whatever the reasons might be, the decision to not volunteer to take the test is itself an indictment of the inadequacies of our educational framework.
How big is the problem?
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Last time round, in 2009, 16000 students from Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh took the test. The results were, to whimper the least, worrisome. It was the first time that India had volunteered to take the tests along with seventy-odd other countries. The proficiency shown by our fifteen-year-olds on all key competencies ? mathematics, reading and science, did not in any way inspire any confidence in our preparedness to meet the challenges of employment and participation in an increasingly technology-driven, global economy. Commenting on India?s performance Lant Pritchett, professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said that the PISA 2009 results ?confirm the worst of what anyone has been saying about the levels of learning in Indian elementary education?. He provides these embarrassingly appalling facts culled from the PISA scores analysis to support his argument:
?the average TN/HP child is 40 to 50 points behind the worst students in the economic superstars?[Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea]?. Equally worrisome is that the best performers in TN/HP – the top 5 percent who India will need in science and technology to complete globally – were almost 100 points behind the average child in Singapore and 83 points behind the average Korean – and a staggering 250 points behind the best in the best.
The PISA alone wasn?t the acid test. Our students have failed all sorts of lab exams administered by researchers ? be it those conducted by Education Initiatives, the ASER test conducted by Pratham or the several surveys conducted by the World Bank. Policy makers aren?t paying adequate attention to the diagnosis.
What really is the problem?
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A greatly thought provoking article (TOI,?9th September) quotes Vimala Ramachandran, a national fellow at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, who said, ?Our children are very good at rote learning. But higher analytical skills and comprehension are poor, which is what PISA checks.? As a teacher, I can see it playing out in classrooms every day. Students in grade seven ? in the school in which the author teaches ? can tell you what the Pythagoras theorem is (that the sum of the square of the length of a hypotenuse in a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of its base and perpendicular height). Brilliant! Right? I?m afraid not. Nearly half of them do not know what a right-angled triangle is and eighty percent in a class of sixty cannot identify either the base or the perpendicular. The ineptitude is not limited to mathematics. Students can tell you what an adjective is but when asked to frame a sentence using the words ?rose? and an adjective of their choice they will roll their eyes and look at the ceiling for inspiration, or deliverance. So, when the government says that the questions do not suit our backgrounds do they mean that we aren?t teaching our students to think and analyse? Or that the teachers in this country are robots working in assembly lines whose sole objective it is to add another year to the students? progress report and move the unfinished product to the next stage, as dictated by the RTE?
The non-solutions
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Prof. Ken Robinson, in one of his much loved and insightful TED talks, points out that education system in countries around the world is still preparing students for jobs in the post-Industrial Revolution era. Most of them are designed to produce civil servants for a defunct empire. To overhaul the entire system would be a long and arduous task and one can?t expect a fractured polity to go about getting this done just yet. However, there are changes that could be made almost immediately to cure some of the maladies the tests have diagnosed. Focussing on tweaking the teacher training programmes, revisiting the curricula or implementing standardised tests across all states are some of them. The aim is not to teach the students analytical skills that will enable them to perform well in the PISA and other standardised tests, although that would be a very welcome windfall. It is to empower them to face the challenges that the future is going to bring with it and enhance their opportunities to find gainful employment.
What baffles the reasonable observer is that instead of concentrating on concrete and achievable steps with quantifiable outcomes state governments are busy fulfilling their campaign promises and doling out sops, which are expensive and ineffectual to boot.? Take for instance the Tamil Nadu government?s recent allotment of 1500 crores for distribution of free laptops to students in schools and colleges. This, in a state where more than 40 percent of the students who took the PISA 2009 test have been graded ?Below level 1? in science (which actually means the students haven?t learnt any science at all in their fifteen years of education), sounds ludicrous.
The tagline below the OECD logo on its websites reads: BETTER POLICIES FOR BETTER LIVES. Are the people in charge of making policies taking heed?
(The author is a Teach for India Fellow)
