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‘They Train Children Like Animals’

There seems to be some kind of deliberate or unintentional or accidental collusion between teaching and coaching. There is a special joy in making the syllabus as tight and big as possible. While examining the child — for example, for engineering — it is assumed that he knows everything, remembers everything — all the constants, all the variables. And he is expected to do it all very quickly.

If all that the coaching classes do is programme the mind to remember all these numbers, why have such a system? There is no need to cram the mind with irrelevant information when it is easily available. I would go so far as to say that students should be given all the constants on a sheet of paper. Special computers can have all those values — gravitational constant, Planck constant, time constant, etc.

Sometimes there are arithmetic calculations that need a lot of time. Coaching classes give tips on how to solve them fast. But why can’t the child be given a simple calculator for that? Even I have to think for half an hour for some of the questions. This has been tried with some IIT professors also, and they have taken a full night to solve the entrance paper.

The teaching shops especially train students to improve their speed; they give the children the same kinds of exercises over and over again so that they learn to do them fast. But I don’t see any logic in limiting the examination to a specified number of hours. What is the harm in giving the paper and asking the child to take as much time as needed to solve it? This will encourage the habit of thinking.
 
Coaching classes force you to have a tunnel vision. They create such pressure of time that the mind stops thinking creatively. They train children like animals to have a prescribed set of qualities and knowledge. Whereas, basically, you should try to judge whether the child has learnt how to think differently.

Even assessment is a difficult thing to design. If somebody does something special, is able to go off tangent and come up with something totally unexpected, then instead of rejecting it outright as incorrect, our evaluation system should be able to appreciate its uniqueness and reward the child accordingly. Coaching classes diminish the creative potential. They do not allow meandering and wandering in different directions for knowledge. Those who undergo a lot of coaching may get a lot of marks, but they come off worse as individuals.

Instead of increasing the capacity of institutes such as IITs and IIMs, a filtration system has been devised. There are different sets of holes and coaching institutes are the sieves that  teach children how to fall through those holes.

It is not the fault of just the coaching institutes. Teaching institutes themselves want students who have a tunnel vision, who can walk like animals on a ledge. And coaching institutes provide them those. That is why courses have also been developed with a tunnel vision — engineering students study only physics, chemistry and maths. Why not literature too?
Then there is the question of stress. It is definitely established that a lot of stress on young minds for a long time permanently damages them. What we do is take some wonderfully bright people who work really hard, and through rigorous coaching, diminish them. Even those who are successful are diminished. Those who are unsuccessful are unhappy. Something needs to be done on that.

Coaching institutes charge lakhs. They take bright people, diminish them and promote discrimination because there might be many bright students who can’t afford the amounts demanded by these institutes. You are promoting a process of selection that rewards only those who can afford a certain kind of education. It has become almost fashionable to join coaching institutes. Question papers are also designed in such a way that you have to learn to pass through certain tunnels which only coaching institutes can teach you how to. And all this is being done at the cost of real creativity.

nikhil govind
2 Nov, 2009 10:32 AM
this coaching issue is utterly irrelevant, they only arise due to the overall mediocrity of the entrance exam system- why not talk about substantive issues like accounting for the quality of faculty, incentivizing them professionally, equity, investment in education as percentage of gdp etc-