A good opinion piece. Although, the piece is focused on India only, the problem of rote learning / memorization is a problem all over South Asia. Heck, Muslims in South Asia feel proud to memorize the whole Quran, without understanding a word of it. Most don't even know the Arabic language. Those people become masters in rote memorization but don't understand what words are coming out of their mouths.
This problem of rote memorization & writing only prescribed answers in exams also lead to "in-the-box" thinking. Creativity is stifled. Silo thinking is encouraged. That's why, most South Asians don't go into subjective or abstract studies (philosophy, religious studies, political sciences etc.) in their lives. Their studies are focused in sciences & math, & even in them, students are encouraged to regurgitate what they memorized in class.
As per my knowledge, this problem of rote memorization is not only limited to elementary or secondary school levels, but, in some cases, go all the way up to professional studies. For instance, students of the Chartered Accountant professional designation in Pakistan are required to memorize the whole international financial regulation book & then pretty much regurgitate it in their exams. So whoever is great in rote memorization & dumping it all in the exams ends up becoming a Chartered Accountant. How can they solve a problem which will require integrative, subjective, & creative thinking?
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It was the picture that gave rise to worldwide derision – an image of relatives & friends scaling the facade of a four-storey building in Bihar, India, to help the pupils inside cheat on their school-leaving exams.
Clearly, cheating cannot be tolerated. But beyond the immediate offence, India needs to tackle the root causes of such large-scale cheating, which happens in various parts of the country. A prominent cause is the system of rote learning common in Indian schools.
Rote learning turns students into parrots, capable of memorizing anything but understanding nothing. The syllabus of the Indian Central Board of Secondary Education relies on memorization & so do the exams. In many subjects, students don’t write essays; they merely tick long lists of multiple-choice questions.
What few sentences they do write on their own have to be identical to what’s found in the textbooks to win high marks. Any variation, even if they represent an improvement or show originality, receives low marks. Students who aim for originality & answer questions correctly but in their own words are penalized.
If rote learning is abolished, then cheating will vanish on its own. Students will only be able to succeed if they have understood the concepts taught, because their exam answers will have to reflect their understanding, rather than their memory.
With the exception of new & improved cheating techniques, rote learning kills creativity, along with originality & critical thinking, which is why India is so rarely in the vanguard of anything new in science, technology or design.
It’s not that Indians are not capable of creativity. You only have to look at the magical skills of Indian craftsmen to appreciate the beauty they can produce. And you only have to look at Indians based abroad to know their abilities. But India’s domestic education system discourages innovation, exploration, risk-taking & the questioning of accepted wisdom.
Who are the educational reformers who can take on this job? Few names but one come to mind: Sugata Mitra, who won the 2013 TED Prize for his fascinating experiments in the use of the Internet in education. Prof. Mitra advocates the benefits of letting children loose in a room with computers, an Internet connection & minimal supervision by teachers. (If nothing else, this would solve the problem of absentee teachers, another bane of the Indian system.)
Prof. Mitra was once asked to name one single measure the Indian government could take to instantly raise the abysmal standards in government schools.
“Let students use the Internet in exams,” he replied. “In doing so, the whole system would have to change. The kind of questions set in exams would have to change. You can’t ask, for example, simple factual questions because they would be too easy to answer. The questions would have to be framed instead to probe students’ understanding of concepts & principles. Educators would also have to teach differently, just as officials would have to rethink the school curriculum.”
Unfortunately, Prof. Mitra has taken himself off to Newcastle University in Britain because the Indian government has shown no interest in his ideas, even though they could lead to enormously improved outcomes.
In other words, the radical reforms India needs are not likely to happen soon. In India, change only happens very slowly & gradually – the country’s culture & mentality are Menshevik, not Bolshevik.
Meanwhile, children continue to endure an education system that is a joke. Last year, an annual independent status report on rural schools found that after 5 years of primary education, more than 60% of children were unable to read simple text at a second-grade level.
Yet these same children will leave school & face ferocious competition for jobs where the only qualification that counts is their exam grades.
When the State Bank of India advertised 1,500 menial vacancies in 2013, it received more than 17 million applications. That’s not a typo: 17 million.
So while it’s easy to scoff at the people perched on those window sills, the reality is that Indian parents will go to any lengths – or heights – to help their children succeed in their last exams.
This problem of rote memorization & writing only prescribed answers in exams also lead to "in-the-box" thinking. Creativity is stifled. Silo thinking is encouraged. That's why, most South Asians don't go into subjective or abstract studies (philosophy, religious studies, political sciences etc.) in their lives. Their studies are focused in sciences & math, & even in them, students are encouraged to regurgitate what they memorized in class.
As per my knowledge, this problem of rote memorization is not only limited to elementary or secondary school levels, but, in some cases, go all the way up to professional studies. For instance, students of the Chartered Accountant professional designation in Pakistan are required to memorize the whole international financial regulation book & then pretty much regurgitate it in their exams. So whoever is great in rote memorization & dumping it all in the exams ends up becoming a Chartered Accountant. How can they solve a problem which will require integrative, subjective, & creative thinking?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was the picture that gave rise to worldwide derision – an image of relatives & friends scaling the facade of a four-storey building in Bihar, India, to help the pupils inside cheat on their school-leaving exams.
Clearly, cheating cannot be tolerated. But beyond the immediate offence, India needs to tackle the root causes of such large-scale cheating, which happens in various parts of the country. A prominent cause is the system of rote learning common in Indian schools.
Rote learning turns students into parrots, capable of memorizing anything but understanding nothing. The syllabus of the Indian Central Board of Secondary Education relies on memorization & so do the exams. In many subjects, students don’t write essays; they merely tick long lists of multiple-choice questions.
What few sentences they do write on their own have to be identical to what’s found in the textbooks to win high marks. Any variation, even if they represent an improvement or show originality, receives low marks. Students who aim for originality & answer questions correctly but in their own words are penalized.
If rote learning is abolished, then cheating will vanish on its own. Students will only be able to succeed if they have understood the concepts taught, because their exam answers will have to reflect their understanding, rather than their memory.
With the exception of new & improved cheating techniques, rote learning kills creativity, along with originality & critical thinking, which is why India is so rarely in the vanguard of anything new in science, technology or design.
It’s not that Indians are not capable of creativity. You only have to look at the magical skills of Indian craftsmen to appreciate the beauty they can produce. And you only have to look at Indians based abroad to know their abilities. But India’s domestic education system discourages innovation, exploration, risk-taking & the questioning of accepted wisdom.
Who are the educational reformers who can take on this job? Few names but one come to mind: Sugata Mitra, who won the 2013 TED Prize for his fascinating experiments in the use of the Internet in education. Prof. Mitra advocates the benefits of letting children loose in a room with computers, an Internet connection & minimal supervision by teachers. (If nothing else, this would solve the problem of absentee teachers, another bane of the Indian system.)
Prof. Mitra was once asked to name one single measure the Indian government could take to instantly raise the abysmal standards in government schools.
“Let students use the Internet in exams,” he replied. “In doing so, the whole system would have to change. The kind of questions set in exams would have to change. You can’t ask, for example, simple factual questions because they would be too easy to answer. The questions would have to be framed instead to probe students’ understanding of concepts & principles. Educators would also have to teach differently, just as officials would have to rethink the school curriculum.”
Unfortunately, Prof. Mitra has taken himself off to Newcastle University in Britain because the Indian government has shown no interest in his ideas, even though they could lead to enormously improved outcomes.
In other words, the radical reforms India needs are not likely to happen soon. In India, change only happens very slowly & gradually – the country’s culture & mentality are Menshevik, not Bolshevik.
Meanwhile, children continue to endure an education system that is a joke. Last year, an annual independent status report on rural schools found that after 5 years of primary education, more than 60% of children were unable to read simple text at a second-grade level.
Yet these same children will leave school & face ferocious competition for jobs where the only qualification that counts is their exam grades.
When the State Bank of India advertised 1,500 menial vacancies in 2013, it received more than 17 million applications. That’s not a typo: 17 million.
So while it’s easy to scoff at the people perched on those window sills, the reality is that Indian parents will go to any lengths – or heights – to help their children succeed in their last exams.
