M K Bhan
From the day when a child is born, everybody starts predicting, assessing and awarding grades according to the child’s responses and reflexes to our curious queries. We forget the scientific laws of growth and development. We want the fruit to ripe before the ripening season so that, we can sell our product at higher rates just for the sake of recovery of our investment and with profit making motives. In the business of fruits, we have miserably failed to compare the difference between the fruits that ripens on its branches by way of natural processes and the fruit which is forced to show its ripening effect with the help of some chemicals. Children are not the fruits for business, they are the gifts of God to us. When we receive these gifts in this world, they have with them the memories of their previous world. As human nature is concerned, we want them to forget those sweet and spiritual memories at the earliest, so that they become aware of this competitive and materialistic world in their tender age-group. What role we as parents play when we start interfering in our child’s imaginative world is full of fantasies and curiosities. We forget to understand that these fantasies and curiosities later on makes him more innovative and creative being. But our expectation and dreams start ruling over the sweet dreams of our innocent children and we force them to get ready for entering the modern educational prisons:- crutches, play schools, pre-nurseries etc. Happiness vanishes, disintegration starts, gears of family ties widens, uncontrolled tears finally find their path through our dry eyes to roll down….and the riddle of life reaches to its conclusion with the remarks…”what we aspired for and what we finally achieved”?
Now, parents do not find any time to be with their wards. As a substitute, they provide best possible facilities and every comfort to their children. Parents are mistaken if they think that these facilities are going to replace or compensate in any way their personal concern, tender touch and love. That is the reason why separation between parents and children starts at an early stage of life. If parents as first teachers can fail in understanding and assessing their children in the most crucial formative years of life, then how a school teacher can be held responsible for the poor performance and grades of their children. Parental Assessment is more reliable and accurate as compared to School Based Assessment up to 9-10 years of age. However, schools can help in the process of assessment and taking the graphical curve of grades upwards.
Our school system ends at class 8th. Both child and parent after class 9th hardly think of schools. Children should be allowed to live through their class 10th,11th,12th experiences and after all these 3 years are fantastic years of their life in which they are discovering themselves, understanding the object of reality instead of spending time on bikes, auto-rickshaws and over-loaded buses, moving from one coaching center to another, knocking the doors of subject tutors for gathering some information. This quality time should have been spent in the school campus, playgrounds, libraries, science, computer and Math laboratories. These years should be spent in getting knowing and building ourselves, building our soul and enjoying the school experiences.
What education should be is answer to all that come into our minds. New knowledge gets generated every 11 to 12 hours, by the time, a book is written on some subject, is obsolete already. If it is obsolete, then question arises what are we teaching and why are we teaching? The clear reason is that we are teaching obscurity one, this is fundamental and the foundation, which will not go obsolete. The most important thing that we experience is, we are learning how to learn and build the ability in the student, so that they continue to learn new things that go along with them, for example; which coaching, when and where to appear for competitive examinations.
The problem with teaching is, it is really easy to cheat, it is really easy to inflate scores without any real learning going on, and it has been clearly documented how teachers do this when they are put under pressure. They teach to test, they use the same tools for testing year after year and actually the norms get out of date because everybody is above average. If the tests does not tell us who needs to be taught, what next, it is a pretty useless test educationally. It might be useful administratively but not educationally. Is this creating a new change or new learning or is it just raising scores?
Teachers believe that assessment should lead to improved learning, students should learn more harder and better because we test and assess them. Accordingly, the teachers should change and improve their teaching, because they are now knowing something more than that what they did not know before the emergence of technology revolution. Children and the work places are intuitively becoming smarter and smarter with advancement in the use of this technology. Do you think, we have any right to just come to a
standstill, discuss about it or act on it and expecting solutions to all this will come from somewhere else. Solution always accompany the problems and answers follow the questions.
We have 300 million children going to schools and 10 million teachers to look after the schooling of these children. On whole USA goes to school here and we have half of African population going as teachers every day. So why we are looking solutions from somewhere else. The whole system of education all over the world, is struggling with the same issues. School Based Assessment has actually brought educational improvement rather than simply accountability. We have to understand the effect of accountability pressure on teachers.
Child should decide which subject he wants to take, rather than colleges and universities deciding the subjects he wants to take. If we do not collaborate, real change is hard to implement. In collaborative effort we learn together because we share the problem. CCE was formulated in India to introduce a more uniform and comprehensive pattern in education for the children all over the nation. In UK, Assessment for Learning (AFL) is seen central to good teaching as regarded by the school leaders and teachers as a key professional skill to plan lessons and evaluate the progress that students made in their learning, thus raising standard of education. We, here in India are still weighing percentages and did not know that the percentage correct scores are always a poor indicators of what students know. Real ability depends on the difficulty of the tasks and not the proportion of questions answered correctly. Rank order scores do not indicate what each person still needs to learn and thus, do not help the teacher to focus on “who needs to be taught and what next”.
(The author is Director-cum-Principal SGGJ Model School, Sunderbani)
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