‘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.

HRD minister Kapil Sibal’s call to curb coaching institutes finds support in some educationists. But the Rs 30,377-crore industry stands its ground the minister for human resource development wishes to rein in coaching institutes, or teaching shops, as he calls them. But his stand is totally unjustified because coaching emerges from the need to excel relative to others and it will continue to increase for all classes and for entrance examinations.

This phenomenon is not unique to India. Coaching is as prevalent in the US and Europe for all classes beginning with early childhood. There is a huge tuition market for SAT-1, SAT-2 (subject achievement tests, prevalent in the US) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language or TOEFL all over the world.

As for all the brouhaha over coaching institutes taking the focus of students preparing for competitive examinations away from senior secondary board examinations, it is important to note that the maximum money spent on coaching in India is for supplementing regular school education, and not for competitive examinations. Even in the best schools, the board toppers take tuitions. Needless to say, school teachers are more concerned about tuitions than teaching in the school.

Now let us analyse the fundamental positioning of IITs. What have they been achieving,  or are purported to be achieving? They have an admission process to select the brightest — bright from the point of view of having the potential to be excellent technocrats. IIT graduates are supposed to create a higher level of productivity in the industry and, thus, contribute to the process of nation-building.

They have been excelling abroad. Their performance has created a lot of interest in India in the minds of those sitting in the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation and various foreign institutional investors, resulting in huge investments in India.

Yet, the number of problems IITs face calls for a serious review of the whole system. There is a severe shortage of teaching staff. They are not able to attract the right talent and there is no system for training the faculty. The teachers are, more often than not, unable to earn as well as their students and feel frustrated. They are right — they deserve better salaries. The government is doing nothing to increase the grants to IITs and the result is they figure nowhere in world rankings. Unlike leading colleges and universities abroad, IIT faculty get few opportunities to do industry-relevant research and consultancy work.

Clearly, IIT graduates have been doing better than the institutes themselves at a global level. The excellence of IITs is not a mark of success of the government or the IIT system, but an expression of Indian talent. The government has done little to enable students from backward areas and villages to have good education so that they too can compete for IITs.

The move to give more weightage to board examinations — up to 80 per cent as per some reports — will restrict students from rural and backward areas. Patterns and, therefore, scoring potential, varies across different boards. Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are some of the boards where scoring 80 per cent-plus is much more difficult than in CBSE. Increasing the weightage for board examinations may lead to boards diluting their papers to let more students score above 80 per cent or whatever is the yardstick set by the IIT council.

The fact is that the boards test something different from what IIT-JEE stands to test. Giving weightage to board marks will defeat the purpose that IIT-JEE wishes to achieve.

Birla Institute of Technology (Bits), Pilani, has moved to an entrance test-based admission process to take the focus away from board examinations. The obvious reason is that there is a huge discrepancy in the marks secured by students from different states, and also the fact that on marks criterion alone, bright students from villages can never make it to Bits Pilani. Even in Delhi College of Engineering, where students come mostly from CBSE schools of Delhi, an entrance test has been introduced as scoring well in CBSE is considered different from having an aptitude for engineering.