Memorise Or Perish

Memorise Or Perish
Ravinder Kaur, Times Of India

As the parent of a child appearing for class X board examination, one is struck by the number of newspaper articles that have appeared this year on students taking ‘memory pills'। Memory pills perhaps for my 86-year-old mother-in-law, but for 16 and 18-year-olds? The need, it appears, arises because students are unable to master the vast syllabi of the board exams। Both parents and children are at their wits' end। I have been for months now attempting to help my son wade through the syllabus for 11 subjects.


I initially relied on his schoolbooks and contemptuously ignored ‘help books'। Finally, as the days to the board got closer, we succumbed to looking at help books and at past board questions. The more one quizzed him using these, the angrier one got. Here are a few questions from past ICSE board exams: Define ‘leaching'. In which region, South of the Tropic of Cancer, can one find soil formed by leaching? What is ‘ratooning'? Give two advantages of ratooning. What is the procedure that should be followed if a non-member of the state legislature is appointed a minister? What was the outcome of the first Lok Adalat? These are all stand-alone questions with not even ‘multiple choice' to jog the memory. Either you remember that particular piece of trivia or you bite the dust. The point here is the level of detail asked for is entirely unnecessary at this stage of learning and deflects from any attempt at developing skills which are creative and logic based.


We have all raved and ranted about how the exam system promotes mere rote learning। For me, these rants were abstract until one encountered the board questions. The exams - at least in biology, geography, history, civics, economics and environmental education - are an exercise in testing your skills at mastering trivia and knowing the irrelevant. In biology, the detail asked for is of that needed for an exam for a higher degree in medicine or botany. Maths has a whole section on banking and taxes. Spare us this in class X! All this is great for a television quiz programme - the more obscure the factoid asked for, the better. But this as school learning? Give us a break. Our school learning system tortures our children endlessly without making learning interesting or a pleasure. Students are expected to master huge amounts of information. The context within which associations for memorising or more accurately, remembering things, are built simply disappears (if it was ever there in the first place). The student goes helter-skelter from one subject to another trying to master the minutiae of the syllabus. OK, one understands the importance of the concept of the Lok Adalat but why the hell do one need to know how many cases were settled on the first day of its functioning? Perhaps, because we want to tout its success on the first day (and never thereafter), which is a telling commentary on our institutions. Is it any wonder then that students are daunted and petrified by board exams? These exams strike at their self-worth and their belief in themselves. No greater damage than this could be done to our children.


It is no surprise that flourishing more than the school education industry is the parallel tuition and coaching industry। A large majority of students is undergoing tutoring because they simply cannot master what they are expected to memorise. Prior to the board exam, the emphasis of all schools is on ‘completing' the syllabus without a thought to whether any student has understood anything at all. The teachers are driven by the board exams and not by their accomplishment in making students understand, let alone enjoy, what is being taught. Teachers respond that they are helpless against the system and even the sensitive ones are forced to give advice contrary to reason. My son pointed out another fact regarding the unthinking nature of syllabi content. In the ICSE book of Hindi stories, all but one is connected with death. Sure to lighten the soul and make for happy reading for a teenager. Well, if it isn't death, it is moralising and nationalism that can no longer be fed to today's youth. And some of these stories (no doubt of great literary merit) need you to follow a dictionary word by word, robbing one of the entire pleasure of reading a story. I was shocked to read one CBSE Hindi teacher's advice in the newspapers - do not write in colloquial Hindi.


Please, give our children a break. Test what they have understood of the syllabus and not insist that their language is of a high Sanskritic order. Making irrelevant Brahmins of them all isn't anyway going to help in today's world. Let them write in the language they converse in and not turn away in disgust from their Hindi books. And the lords of education - if there is any power on earth you have to reduce our children's suffering - please do it quickly before we have more young wrecks floating around. (The writer teaches at IIT Delhi.)