Another Brick in the Wall

Education is fast becoming a fad-ridden industry, and nowhere is this more evident than in small town India.
Ride through the streets of Patna and you cannot fail to see a plethora of posters, wall writing, and billboards merrily advertising everything from ‘Dharapravah Angrezi in 30 days’ to ‘Cracking the Chemistry paper by Xyz Sir’.
Children are robbed of their childhood and enslaved to textbooks by first generation ‘urban parents’, whose daily chant is ‘get up, brush, study and go for tuitions’.

Teaching Shops
The employees of the so-called ‘English Medium’ teaching shops that masquerade as schools – they do not deserve to be called teachers – actually discourage children from reading books beyond the prescribed texts. I have heard in shocked disbelief that parents in Patna [and I daresay elsewhere] discourage their kids from reading storybooks!
School libraries that are supposed to be storehouses of knowledge of all kinds are reduced to textbook godowns that stock books on chemistry, physics and mathematics and nowadays, computers. General Knowledge is a ‘subject’ to be mugged up and not to be gleaned through leisurely forays into magazines, books, or life experiences. The so-called ‘teacher’ of a teaching factory thinks it is enough for a kid to ‘know’ that Dickens wrote a book called ‘Oliver Twist’, it is not necessary for the child to actually read it and experience it for himself.
If you are a schoolteacher who discourages your student from reading children’s literature, you are responsible for producing a half-baked human being. Worse, if you are a schoolteacher who does not read children’s literature, you are a half-baked teacher. If you are a teacher of English and have not read Harry Potter, or the books of Roald Dahl, or at least Enid Blyton and Amar Chitra Katha, your knowledge is severely limited.

Woefully Limited
Every year, I face a class of ‘English Medium’ students – products from ‘English Medium’ Patna schools. I happen to teach Journalism and Media studies in a Communicative English Curriculum at the undergraduate level. Most of these ‘plus two’ students who aspire to become communicators have very poor communication skills, or social skills for that matter. Their reading, by and large, is woefully limited to the English textbooks. Their comprehension is usually appalling. I have discovered that more than half the students no idea about Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, or even Cinderella. They do not read modern authors, not even the Barbara Cartland, Denise Robbins or Mills & Boon! Forget about the ‘more serious’ reading material. They don’t read. Period.

To teats their English comprehension skills, I play a common song like “Country Roads”, and more than half the students cannot make out the words. In a class of 35, there will be about five students who can tell me the names of five English singer/ songwriters or pop groups. These are English medium students who have been studying for 12 years in English medium schools and they cannot comprehend the first fifteen minutes of ‘The Sound of Music’ or ‘My fair lady’. Worse still, more than half the class have never watched an English film!

These students ‘read’ newspapers, but if you ask them what they think of Jug Suraiya, or Karan Thapar or Bagchi Karkariya (or any other regular columnist with the exception of Bejan Daruwalla) and they stare at you open-mouthed. Most of these young people do not have the ability to think for themselves, to engage in discourse. They spout generalities. They are shaky and diffident when the discourse leads beyond the textbook.

Frogs in wells
And to think that parents spend so much of money on an ‘English Medium’ education! English is supposed to broaden your worldview, but what are the end products of these teaching shops? Loud-mouthed brats with the perspective of a frog in a well!

Now ask any parent why education is important. Why do they strive hard to send their kids to a particular school? The answer will invariably be: to give them social graces, to instil a sense of discipline, to make my child a good citizen, so that my child learns values such as honesty, to make my child a well rounded human being. This is why they would pay through their noses, so that their children become world citizens, but with their feet firmly rooted in reality.
But does our school education system value the disciplined, the polite, the well-rounded human child? A child may be polite, honest, excel at dramatics and debates, do well on the sports field, but is he valued if he just brings home average grades in science and maths? Certainly not! Because punctuality, good leadership qualities, and honesty do not fetch ‘marks’. As a matter of fact, in the senior classes, the teachers themselves cast aside all value systems and honesty and allow (or may I dare say ‘encourage’) the students to cheat on project work and practical assignments. To ensure that the students pass, they award the highest possible marks to all students during internal evaluation, regardless of whether the student is a hardworking one or a shirker.

Teacher as salesman

In this mass-produced, throwaway consumer culture, it is not the durability or the reliability of the product that counts, as long as the package is fine, the goods will pass muster. So, it does not matter whether your student actually has an education, it is the marks on the report card that matter. No wonder then, that teachers have lost all respect, after all, they are just over-the-counter salespersons.
If you have the good fortune to have a teacher who believes that her profession is a vocation and not a career, you are blessed indeed.

The Master teacher is knowledgeable. She reads a lot. She has a worldview and knows that there is no such thing as a ‘superior’ or an ‘inferior’ culture. She challenges her students to explore, to experience life, to test the boundaries. She knows her subject thoroughly and strives to ensure that the weakest students are enthused by her teaching. She is impartial with a sense of fair dealing and fair play, and she is not impressed by how ‘famous’ or what a ‘big person’ a child’s parents are.

In the seventies, the rock band Pink Floyd, wrote an anthem, “Another Brick in the Wall.” The lyrics are telling indeed. “We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. Dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teacher, leave that kid alone. Teacher! Leave that kid alone!”

When teachers themselves have forgotten what the true purpose if education is, when they themselves bend the value system for narrow pecuniary and political gains, then all that is achieved by this education are bricks for a wall, not human beings. The products of this ‘marks oriented’ mass produced education are faceless, square entities, devoid of humanity with facts and figures loosely rattling round inside their heads.

Has the teaching shop killed the traditional school yet? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…



Author: Frank Krishner