the economic times first principles a monthly column on ... · germs eat all the food in our...

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THE ECONOMIC TIMES

FIRST PRINCIPLES

A monthly column on Education

Jayashree RamadasHomi Bhabha Centre for Science Education

Jan 1993 - May 1994

Contents

1. Let’s play ball with the moon ———————— 3

2. The burden of shibboleths ———————— 6

3. Learning byte by byte ———————— 9

4. The ware is soft on education ———————— 12

5. Imagined stereotypes ———————— 15

6. Tapping womenpower ———————— 18

7. Spirit of the child ———————— 21

8. Early, but correctly ———————— 24

9. Seat-of-the-pants physics ———————— 27

10. Foundation in concrete ———————— 30

11. Mother of all tongues ———————— 33

12. Toying with bright ideas ———————— 36

13. Knowing the world, naturally ———————— 38

14. Of mindless pendatism ———————— 41

15. Lessons in boredom ———————— 43

16. No budding Einsteins here ———————— 45

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THE ECONOMIC TIMES30 January 1993 VOL 32 N 328

FIRST PRINCIPLESJAYASHREE RAMADAS

Let’s play ball with the moon

Why do we get a stomach upset? Iasked twelve year old Ajit. “It is be-cause of germs”. He answered casu-ally, ”we have learnt about that in sci-ence”. “Really? Where do these germscome from, and what do they actuallydo in your stomach?” “When we eattoo many sweets, they rot inside thestomach and make tiny germs. Thegerms eat all the food in our stomachand grow bigger and bigger, they turninto worms and bite us from inside.”“Did your teacher tell you this?” “Notall of it,” said Ajit, “but I have seenpictures of germs in a book, so I knowit is true.”

Traditional methods of teachingrely on a view of the learner whichdates back to Plato – a blank slatewhich can be written on by experi-ences. The teacher’s job, accordingto this view, is to present the contentso that it can be recorded on mem-

ory faithfully. Sometimes there maybe loss in transmission, or the record-ing may get fainter with time, but ifthe teachers’ presentation is clear andforceful, the intended message will getacross.

A few innovative teachers maysometimes use hands-on experience inscience, relying on field trips, activitiesand even discovery methods. Despitetheir value, such methods often fail toaddress the basic issue: is the messagegoing across to students? How muchdo they really understand?

Most good teachers realize that stu-dents are often unclear on basic con-cepts. The best students in the classmight do well on text book sciencequestions, but they usually can not ap-ply their knowledge to real situations.In mathematics, students may acquirecalculation skills, but rarely developproblem solving abilities.

Research over the last 20 years haschallenged the simple model of thelearner as a blank slate and questionedthe present teaching methods. Thestudent entering the classroom comeswith a host of experiences, ideas, be-liefs and expectations about the nat-ural world. What is taught is neverrecorded faithfully nor simply over-written on previous preconceptions.The student ’interprets’ the new con-tent in the context of his or her priorknowledge. This view of learning im-plies an active construction of knowl-edge inside the student’s head. Newknowledge cannot be simply absorbed.

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It has to be assimilated and in the pro-cess, existing knowledge also needs tobe restructured.

Very young children are astonish-ingly fast learners. In a year ortwo from birth they pick up complexknowledge that allows them to talkfluently, deal with the physical world,with people around them, and to getthings done in their own way. Theydo like this any good scientist would:by constantly forming hypothesis, test-ing them against experiences, modify-ing them when necessary, and incor-porating the results in their theoriesabout the world. By the time stu-dents formally start learning science,their naıve theories (’alternative con-ceptions’) are already quite extensive.

These naıve theories persist ifteaching fails to take account of them.The student has a vague sense of un-ease, of not really understanding sci-ence, and not being able to identify theexact problem.

There are several ways in which thestudent resolves the issue. Sometimes,new ideas are simply rejected for beinginconsistent with earlier ideas. Moreoften, naıve theories coexist with thescience taught in the classroom, witha tacit understanding that school sci-ence is for the exams, while ’common-sense’ is for dealing with the real world.Sometimes, as in the case of Ajitquoted above, ideas learnt in school areintegrated with preconceptions to forma composite theory, in which science isclearly mis-interpreted.

Systematic research is being donein countries around the world to under-stand students’ naıve theories in differ-ent areas of science. This has been anactive area in The Homi Bhabha Cen-tre for Science Education in Bombay,dealing till now with the topics of light,motion, Galilean relativity, chemical

combinations and human physiology.We have seen, for example, on the sub-ject of light that students may learnabout rays of light going in straightlines, but in everyday contexts theymay still think of light as a diffusesubstance that stays around the lightbulbs, that illuminates objects from adistance, that helps you to see thingswhen it enters your eyes from a sourceand goes from your eyes to the object.

With these insights into learning,the teacher’s job becomes more com-plex. She has to understand the pre-conceptions of students, invent appro-priate examples and learning activitiesthat will challenge the students’ ideas,help them understand the legitimatecontexts in which their own ideas havebeen formed, and make the scientificnotions intelligible and plausible.

Fortunately it may not be neces-sary to understand individually thenaıve theories of some 50-odd studentsin the classroom. That would be a nearimpossible task. Human beings havecommon ways of reasoning and expe-riences of the natural world are alsocommon across the children. Some in-terpretations which come from every-day language may also fairly univer-sal due to common roots of Indian lan-guages. If at the start, the teacher getsstudents to make their spontaneousideas explicit, to make them aware thatthere are other ways of thinking, to getthem discuss and defend a set of ideasagainst a competing one, a beginningwould have been made.

The whole exercise has to be car-ried out in such away that the stu-dents feel that their ideas are impor-tant and valued in the classroom. Thatwould require a radical change fromthe authoritarian atmosphere of ourclassrooms. More importantly, the syl-labus load will have to be drasticallyreduced if genuine understanding is to

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get priority. This is where curriculummakers and textbook writers come intopicture. They have to incorporate newideas about learning into textbooks sothat the teachers’ load is reduced. —

————————————-The author is with the Homi BhabhaCentre for Science Education, Bom-bay. This column will appear once amonth.

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THE ECONOMIC TIMES27 February 1993 VOL 32 N 356


The burden of shibboleths

American educators have been dis-turbed by a series of cross-national sur-vey of educational attainment. Thesetests have shown, year after year andbeyond doubt, that students in Japan,China, Taiwan, Korea and even In-dochinese refugee families out-performAmerican students in Maths, scienceand reading: Not just in basic skillsbut in creativity and problem-solvingtests also.

Researchers have looked at the pos-sible factors behind this success. Muchto everyone’s relief, the answer doesnot seem to lie in intelligence differ-ences or inherent ability but with cer-tain attitudes towards education andschooling. Chinese and Japanese stu-dents, and also their parents, considereducation to be crucial to success inlife. Indochinese refugee families inAmerica place great value on readingand learning.

Japanese, Chinese and Indochinesestudents (I will call them “Asian”from now on) are willing to workharder than their American counter-parts. One reason for their motivationseems to be their and their parents’ be-lief that effort is more important thanability. Thus, they de-emphasise indi-vidual differences in potential, and giveimportance to hard work.

American students and their par-ents have wide-ranging and diffusegoals, consisting of material and socialsuccess (not necessarily via education).Also, they believe in innate ability, andthus do not see the relevance of extraeffort.

Perhaps the extraordinary perfor-mance of Asian students carries a highpsychological cost. Are they strainingunder the enormous pressure to suc-ceed? Is this strain leading to high rateof suicide, to incidents of cruel raggingin schools?

The answers are not as clear-cut asoften made out in the media. The ado-lescent suicude rate in Japan decreasedby 43 per cent during 1975-84, while itincreased in US by 17 per cent. Com-parative studies of psychological ad-justment in Asian and American stu-dents find that the latter show moreevidence of stress, academic anxiety,and aggression. The clear academicgoals of Asian students, along with thewhole-hearted support of their parentsand teachers, may in fact reduce thestrain of hard work.

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Whatever the verdict, this con-troversy should not detract from thelessons that we need to learn fromour neighbors, from their parents aswell as from their school systems. Wehave two separate systems of schools:the government or municipal schoolscatering to students fro lower socio-economic backgrounds, and better-offprivate schools. The problems in thesetwo types of schools may appear tobe different, but at another level, theyboth have to do with attitudes.

I have spoken to students, teachersand parents belonging to the first kind,the rural and municipal schools. Quiteoften, I have found a fatalistic attitudetowards the performance of studentswho come from poor families, have noguidance at home and are sometimessuspected of having low intelligence.The baseless ness of such beliefs hasbeen demonstrated repeatedly in a fewexceptional schools around the countryand in research projects at the HomiBhabha Centre for Science Education.

Yet we do not seem to realize theenormity of loss to the country byour lack of will to invest in educa-tion. By lack of commitment, wefail to draw the best out of the vestpool of talent which stagnates in ourforgotten villages. In a recent bookcalled The Child and the Sate in In-dia, Mr. Myron Weiner claims that itis not so much poverty, but the neg-ative attitudes of our educators andofficials which are at the root of ourslow progress towards universal pri-mary education. We even have influ-ential politicians who say that educa-tion is not a primary need in India. Asa society, we do not believe in educa-tion.

I think that these attitude-problems apply to the educated mid-dle class, even in their role as parents.The character of our middle class is

changing rapidly. With increased af-fluence has come a dedication to ma-terial goals, for which education is butone means. We do not question thequality of learning, as long as we areable to acquire the degrees.

So what should we expect from ourschools? Let us go back to the Chineseand Japanese schools to see what hap-pens there. The teaching professionis highly respected. Salaries are highenough to inspire bright young gradu-ates to go into teaching. Even novicesearn more than white-collar workers inbusiness and industry with similar edu-cational backgrounds. Teachers have areasonable teaching load and frequentin-service education.

Compare this with our typicalprimary schools, where teachers arein classroom continuously for six toseven hours, apart from the schoolbreaks. Even in relatively affluent pri-vate schools, teachers are ill-paid, over-worked, and shown scant respect.

Japanese and Chinese teachershave enough time between classes toprepare lessons, consult other teach-ers about techniques, correct papers,and work with individual students whoneed help. Institutionally, there is anenvironment in which professional de-velopment is valued. Teaching is a co-operative activity. Experienced teach-ers help newer recruits and groups ofteachers exchange notes on lesson plan-ning and framing questions.

The actual techniques used bythese teachers simply involve skilfulapplication of well-known principles,for which they have the time and en-ergy. Their task is also made easier byan interested and motivated group ofstudents, who do not have to be con-stantly exhorted to keep quiet. Thesecould be our children and our schools.Are we willing to take the lesson?

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—————————————-The author is with the Homi BhabhaCentre for Science Education, Bom-

bay. This column appears once amonth.

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THE ECONOMIC TIMES27 March 1993 VOL 33 N 23


Learning byte by byte

In the recent budget, computer ed-ucation in schools has received boost,with an allocation of Rs. 26 crore.This is possibly at the expense ofthe laboratory programs of secondaryschools. Are we talking about the icingwhen we do not even have a cake?

Depending on one’s vantage point,there are different approaches to theuse of computers in schools. Onewould be to exploit the latest tech-nology, without much worry about re-sources constraints, taking into ac-count current educational thinking andresearch. Another is to select ideaswhich seem desirable and practical forthe implementation in schools. A thirdone is shaped by ground realities inclassrooms.

Today we will concern ourselvesonly with the potential of present-day computers, and what has been

done with them, mostly in small ’PilotProjects’, in other countries. A planfor how best computers can be used inthe Indian context has to emerge out ofour unique conditions and experiencesto which I will turn next month.

Computers came into education inthe USA in the nineteen sixties. Theiruse was closely associated with theidea of “programmed learning” de-rived from the behaviorist psychologyof the period. This involved present-ing the content of given subject ina step-by-step manner on a computerscreen, asking the student some crit-ical questions, and providing correc-tive feedback. These Computer AidedInstruction (CAI) programmes wereavailable on mainframe computers andwere used in undergraduate educationin combination with automatic testingand record-keeping systems.

Computers become accessible toschools when microcomputers came onthe market. The idea behind in-troducing computers was mainly toteach about computers, but there wasalso a strong movement towards devel-oping educational software, generallyknown as Computers Assisted Learn-ing (CAL).

In the last 10 years the rationalefor using computers in schools has un-dergone a rapid shift in the West.What started out as a need for com-puters awareness , for becoming famil-iar with computers because they werepervading society, soon merged withan emphasis on computers literacy, or

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learning to use computer for vocationalcompetence. The use of computers tosupport and supplement teaching alsobecome widespread. Related hardwareand software evolved greatly. Simul-taneously, research has produced newinsights into learning processes. Manypeople have looked to computers to im-plement the desire structural changesin classroom learning. The keywordnow is ILE (interactive Learning En-vironments).

One of the pioneers of the currentmovement was Seymour Papert of theMIT, who developed the Logo com-puter language in the 1970’s. Logo isnow widely used in American schools,from KG to high school levels. TheMIT group has undertaken a series ofresearch projects to explore the edu-cational possibilities of computers andLogo. In inner-city Boston I havewatched children from poor familiesworking with total absorption on tasksthat called for understanding of moremaths, science and technology thanwould be expected from most studentsof their age.

This idea is that children learnthrough designing and creating theirown “artifacts” or “objects to thinkwith”. The computer is powerful andversatile tool that lets them do this. Inparticular Papert claims that program-ming helps children to improve theirproblem solving skills. The artefactsmay be programs that drawn geomet-rical figures and diagrams in biology, ora piece of creative writing with graph-ics on the Logo word processor, or atoy car that is controlled by comput-ers. School children create their owneducational software and video games.Environment in schools is such that itallow free access to computers at alltimes.

The MIT group, in collaborationwith the Danish toy company, Inter-

lego, has developed Lego-logo, a com-bination of Lego building block andLogo programs. The blocks come withmotors, gear and transmission assem-blies, and touch and optical sensors.Using these children build their ownmachines, then write Logo programswhich control them via an interface.

A descendant of Logo is “Boxer”,developed by Andrea DiSessa and col-leagues at the University of California,Berkeley. This system allows studentsto write programs with complex sub-procedures. They can use these, forexample to make explicit their ideasabout a topic in science, and then worktowards an acceptable representationof their knowledge. Boxer has beenused successfully to create “computa-tional microworlds”, like a world of ob-jects that obey Newton’s laws. Ex-periments in these simulated environ-ments enable a feel for how abstractlaws work.

The coming of interactive videodiskplayers has led to development of mul-timedia software, which allows teach-ers and student to create documentconsisting of text, videos and graph-ics. This high technology is useful onlyit is used in educationally meaningfulways to encourage good design, clearconcepts, critical analysis, and socialskills.

Another technology that is be-ing exploited for educational useis computer-based telecommunicationnetworks. There are scores of interna-tional networks of school student com-municating on topics ranging from me-tereology to the meaning of life. In onesuch project, ten thousand studentsaround the U.S. are doing research onacid rain. They collect samples of wa-ter, analyse them, and communicatetheir findings to other student aroundthe world.

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This may all seem like a lot of glitz,and one might wonder, can meaningfullearning not happen with a much lowerlevel of technological inputs? Well,certainly it can. The question is, asHumpty Dumpty said, “Which is to bemaster?” In all the projects above theefforts is to actively direct the way in

which technology impacts education.Within the resources available to us,that should be our concern now.

—————————————-The author is with the Homi BhabhaCentre for Science Education, Bom-bay. This column appears once amonth.

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THE ECONOMIC TIMES24 April 1993 VOL 33 NO 51


The ware is soft on education

Computers were formally intro-duced in Indian schools in 1984, withthe “Computer Literacy and Studies inSchools (CLASS)” project initiated bythe Department of Electronics (DoE).The question of priorities, uppermostin discussions at that time, is still rel-evant. Do we really need computers tothe schools when even basic needs arenot met? Is the euphoria about com-puters simply to divert attention fromthe real problems?

Despite these objections, the DoEexpressed a firm committed to forgedahead with the project. The argumentwas (and still is) that education mustbe consistent with the national policyof computerisation. With computersenvisaged as entering public servicesand private enterprises on a vast scale,computer training of the young mustkeep pace.

Of course, that argument has flaws:a scientific or technological advance,

through revolutionary and far-reachingin its impact on society, is not sufficientreason to override educational priori-ties. Vocational training in comput-ers can well be taken up at the postschool stage. Unfortunately, the pres-sure to introduce computers in IndianSchools has less to do with their ed-ucational value than with social andmarket forces. But given this reality,it is still possible for educators to di-rect the way in which the technologyimpact school learning.

When the CLASS project was in-troduced in 1984, a fair amount ofplanning went into the preparation ofobjectives for the programme, design-ing a curriculum, working out the lo-gistics of distribution and maintenanceof the BBC microcomputers (in 250schools to start with, now a few thou-sand schools), or teacher training andsoftware development.

An early evaluation of the project,carried out in 1985-86 by the Devel-opment and Educational Communica-tion Unit of the Indian Space Re-search Organization (ISRO), Ahmed-abad, showed that the project wasmarkedly more successful in the better-off schools. A major problem thatcome to light was the plethora of agen-cies involved in implementation. Lackof co-ordination and communicationbetween the agencies led to a numberof glitches in the implementation.

At the level of teachers, there wereproblems of adequate training, lack ofmotivation, and sometimes sheer disin-

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terest. The project was expected to becarried out by teachers in addition totheir existing work-load, without anymonetary compensation. Especially inurban areas with their lucrative possi-bilities of private tuitions, the CLASSbait was simply not taken up by manyteachers.

The ISRO study found that stu-dent were uniformly enthusiastic aboutworking with computers, but in mostcase due to other limiting factors theydid not get sufficient exposure to themachines. In exceptional cases whenthey did, the impact of the project wasmostly positive.

It is an inescapable fact about com-puters that young people take to themmore readily than to adults. Thus, astrategy that takes teachers’ expertiseas a pre-requisite to getting anythingthrough to the students, is bound torun into a serious bottleneck. Theremay be a few highly qualified teach-ers who, especially if given a reason-able workload, are able to carry outa successful programe in their schools.But the majority of teachers need tocompletely reorient themselves and getused to being learners alongside thestudents.

Given the daunting task of large-scale teacher training, the CLASSproject has had to keep to the mod-est objectives of “demystifying com-puters”, which has consisted, for thestudents, of identifying parts of thecomputer, being proficient with thekeyboard, and working through ready-made educational software. Some-times when students get bored of thesoftware, teachers encourage them towrite programs, but they do not con-sider that to be a part of the “CLASSproject”, and are even afraid that theymay be overstepping the limits of theirduties.

This is a curious state of affairs,for the strongest educational justifica-tion for a computer in the classroom isthe sense of empowerment that it cangive to students. This empowermentcomes from using the computer as atool, making it do what you want itto do, using it to solve problems. Pro-gramming is an essential step towardsthis goal. It may even be possible toturn to advantage our low computeravailability, by developing “computersupport for collaborative learning”, asound pedagogical principle that in-volves groups of students collaboratingon problem solving tasks.

A few years after the launch-ing of CLASS, a more spontaneousmovement come about it many ur-ban schools, who bought or rentedtheir own computers, supported by pri-vate computer companies who now de-sign the courses and even the teach-ing. While this approach does awaywith the need for teacher training, italso often leaves educational objectivesby the wayside. Students are madeto learn word-processing, spreadsheetand database “applications” in a fairlyroutine manner, while the rest of thetime they play computer games of amindless variety. Of course, this sys-tem too has its survivors: there aresome good trainers, as some studentswho do learn to use computers.

But it is time for the cart to stopblocking the horses in our schools andeducation considerations too get right-ful priority. We should realize thatcomputers by themselves cannot workwonders: they need to be part of apackage that consists of good bookbooks, laboratories and teachers. Also,since quality software is hard to comeby and expensive to produce, such apackage should not depend criticallyon the availability of software. Instead,introducing student to programming,

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preferably in a collaborative mode, canset them on the way to a satisfyinglearning experience.

—————————————-

The author is with the Homi BhabhaCentre for Science Education, Bom-bay. This column appears once amonth.

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THE ECONOMIC TIMES22 May 1993 VOL 33 NO 79


Imagined stereotypes

Since the time when girls first en-tered school in large numbers, theirperformance vis-a-vis boys has beenthe subject of conscious or uncon-scious evaluation. Although todaymost liberal-minded persons woulddeny that there are differences in intel-ligence between girls and boys, somestereotypes do persist. A popular ideais that if girls do well in exams, it isdue to their hard work and ‘cramming’which is, supposedly, a natural resultof their docile and conformist nature.If boys do well, their success is morelikely to be attributed to natural intel-ligence.

Is there any validity to such stereo-types? The evidence for sex differ-ences in cognition, and their origin, isa controversial issue, to which I willturn next month. But there are moreurgent practical considerations, to dowith the school environment, which in-dicate that girls and boys may be actu-ally learning differently in our schools.

Research on school performance inWestern countries shows that girls as

a group are ahead of boys in the earlyyears, but then gradually fall behind.In India too, one is struck by the intel-lectual precocity of girls in nursery andkindergarten classes who, some yearslater, are turned into giggly, diffidentadolescents. Though little comparableresearch has been done in India, thereis some evidence that the male superi-ority in academic performance seen inWestern countries may not be presenthere (although girls do suffer disadvan-tage when it comes to subject and ca-reer selection).

At the school level, our major prob-lem is that of girls dropping out inlarge numbers. The 1981-82 figures ofthe Ministry of Education showed that83.6 % of 6-14 year old boys were en-rolled in schools, while only 53.6 % ofgirls were. Societal factors are blamedfor this major debacle, and rightly so.But it is not often realized how muchof the remedy of might lie within theschool system.

A classic study, carried out byRosenthal and Jacobson in the UnitedStates and published in 1968 underthe title, ’Pygmalion in the classroom’,showed that teachers’ expectations canbe subtly shape and alter the perfor-mance of students. A group of stu-dent were selected at random, buttheir teachers were told that thesestudents had been identified as ’in-tellectual bloomers’. Eight monthslater these randomly chosen studentsshowed significant gains in IQ scores.

Teacher expectations, reinforced by

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societal stereotypes, could well affect,for example, the performance and self-concept of socio-economically deprivedstudents, and likewise, the perfor-mance of girls. Studies of classroom in-teraction show that, in general, teach-ers in co-educational classrooms inter-act more with boys than they do withthe girls. The boys in fact demand andgrab the teacher’s attention. In thebargain they get more praise as well asmore disapproval, while the girls aresimply passed and over and ignored.In India this phenomenon is strikingin rural classrooms, where sometimesgirls seems to be accepted more by suf-ferance than by choice.

The passive role of girls is actuallyreinforced by teachers when, for exam-ple, they intervene and complete a taskfor a girl who needs help, but a boyin a similar situation gets extended in-structions on how to do the thing forhimself. When a boy calls out an an-swer in class, the teacher often acceptsand responds, while if a girl does thesame, she is likely to be reprimandedand asked to raise her hand. The re-sult is that girls become more helplessand dependent, while losing out on theteacher’s time and quality of attention.

TEXTBOOKS are another part ofthe unwitting scheme which relegatesgirls to the background. Althoughthere is a sea change from the timewhen we used to have science booksaddressed explicitly to ’boys’, today’sbooks continue to display a clear biasagainst girls. Studies done in Westerncountries as well as in India show thatmale-centered stories and illustrationsdominate in textbooks. While boys aredepicted as brave and ingenious, girlsare often shown as powerless victims.

Science textbooks are particularlyguilty in perpetuating the image ofthe active, experimenting boy accom-panied by an occasional passively ob-

serving girl. Many schools institu-tionalise such stereotypes by offeringsubjects like computers and electricalmaintenance exclusively to boys, whilethe girls do sewing and cookery.

Today, major publishers in theWest have guidelines for non-sexistwriting, which include instructions forproviding roles models for both sexes,acknowledging the contributions ofwomen, and avoiding sexist language.But the implementation of these guide-lines has been slow.

The status of women in the curricu-lam received attention at the NCERTin 1975, when the report of the com-mittee on the status of women in In-dia was released. The NCERT fol-lowed up by a series of regional and na-tional seminars on how values of equal-ity of women could be incorporated inthe curriculum, and in 1982-84 pro-duced three teacher’s handbooks onthe ’Status of women through curricu-lum’, with useful suggestions for high-lighting the rights of women and em-phasising competence in both girls andboys. But their suggestions for scienceteaching did not go much beyond in-cluding examples of household science.

The NCERT textbooks publishedrecently, however, do show some at-tempt at a avoiding sex-based stereo-types and male-centered language intextbooks. To a lesser extent, this at-titude is percolating into state govern-ment textbooks too, but there is a longway to go. A popular series of sci-ence textbooks used in private Bombayschools still shows a casual indifferenceto the presence of girl students.

Today, many of the more fortu-nately placed girls are overcoming suchhurdles and confidently entering male-dominated fields. Still, the majoritycontinue to suffer discrimination.

—————————————-

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The author is with the Homi BhabhaCentre for Science Education, Bom-

bay. This column appears once amonth.

16

THE ECONOMIC TIMES3 July 1993 VOL 33 NO 121


Tapping womenpower

Is it true that men are rational andscientific while women are emotional?Do girls and boys differ in their think-ing? These are among the most diffi-cult question for psychology, for stereo-types play a major role in shaping ourbehaviour as well as our perception.Although much research has been donein this area in the West, analysing itsresults is a daunting task, since no re-searcher or editor of a scholarly journalcan claim to be free of bias.

The responsibility was undertakenby two psychologists, Maccoby andJacklin, who published in 1974 a bookcalled “The Psychology of Sex Differ-ences”. The late 1960’s had been theera of large scale biologically orientedtheories of human behaviour. Biolog-ical determinists sought to show thatmuch of human behaviour, includingthe so-called sex differences, were ge-netically determined and selected byevolution. But Maccoby and Jack-lin’s survey of research took the thrust

out of such arguments by showing thatmany of the sex differences “explained”by biologists actually did not exist.

This in spite of the fact that stud-ies which found no difference betweenthe sexes had a hard time gettinginto print, as research journals pre-ferred demonstrations of positive re-sults. The vast unruly mass of datadid yield a few small yet consistent dif-ferences between girls and boys. Girlshad slightly higher scores on “verbalabilities” and boys on “visuo-spatialabilities”. These differences held onthe average: they were not large topredict differences between individualgirls and boys.

Little girls often learn to talk beforeboys do. Their speech also becomescomplex earlier, which might give theman advantage over boys in the earlyyears of school. This early verbal pre-cocity is reinforced by sex-role stereo-types so that as they grow up, girlstend to prefer reading, writing and ver-bal modes of thinking.

But even this apparently “innate”difference between girls and boysis highly susceptible to influence ofstereotypes. Research shows that stu-dents do well on reading if they per-ceive task to be sex-appropriate. Ifboys see reading as an acceptable mas-culine activity, they perform as well asgirls do. It interesting that over thelast 30 years, sex-differences in verbalabilities have been apparently decreas-ing.

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Visuo-spatial abilities include find-ings one’s way around a town or build-ing, reading maps, mentally rotat-ing two and three-dimensional objects,playing chess, solving mazes and do-ing jigsaw puzzles. These abilities arealso called on in learning mathematics,physic and chemistry. Typically, differ-ences in visuo-spatial abilities betweengirls and boys appear around ado-lescence, although some studies finddifferences even earlier. Adolescencebeing the time of intense hormonalchanges and also the time at whichthe sex-roles become strongly differ-entiated, both biological and environ-mental determinists have claimed thespatital ability results to support theirown viewpoint.

The effects of environment, how-ever, are easier to see. Sex differencesin science and mathematics achieve-ment, and in visuo-spatial ability, varyconsiderably from country to country.Differences are particularly marked incountries were where women play asubmissive role and are confined to thehouse, while they are non-existent inother parts of the world, for example,among the Eskimos, where women en-joy equal status and freedom to exer-cise all their faculties.

Visuo-spatial abilities can be eas-ily taught. The more the number ofmathematics courses taken by a stu-dent, the better are his or her scores.As more and more girls have started totake higher mathematics courses, thesex difference in visuo-spatial abilitieshas decreased.

Sex-role stereotyping in schools isstrong. Girls in single-sex schools dobetter at maths and science than girlin co-ed schools, while for boys the op-posite is true. A likely explanation isthat when girls and boys come togetherto learn, it is the boys whose seize theadvantage, while girls perhaps try to

play down their own abilities in orderto conform to their “feminine” roles.

Early research on sex differenceshad often assumed that the school pro-vided identical experiences to girls andboys, so any differences in performancemust be due to innate factors, or per-haps socialisation outside the class-room. But when strong stereotypingin schools became obvious, the focuschanged to what could be done via ed-ucation. Even if some innate differ-ences exist, the evidence suggests thatthese can be overcome largely by theschools.

The largest differences in girls andboys actually seems to lie in fac-tors like values, attitudes, motivation,self-confidence, and career orientation.Girls seem to driven to a kind oflearned helplessness and a fear of fail-ure, reinforced by society, by educa-tional practices, and by sexist mes-sages in the media and the textbooks.

One such factor serving to alienategirls is the masculine image of mathsand science. A recent issue of thejournal Science has a special sectionon “Gender and the Culture of Sci-ence”. In it several scientists explorethe idea that there may be a special“female style” of doing science whichdiffers from the dominant style featur-ing “Man as a conqueror of nature”.

Several recent science and mathscurricula being developed in the Westemphasise the need for “girl friendly”teaching materials. One of the thingsthey are trying to do is to reduce themasculine images like guns, cannonsand footballs in subjects like physics.

Research also shows that the de-tached, overly rational image of sci-ence, unrelated to personal and socialconcerns, is harder to accept for girlsthan it is for boys. Many programmesfind that when the real world relevance

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of science is bought out, girls are mo-tivated to learn. And they will needto be, as a society grappling with awe-some global problems cannot afford tolose out on the brain power of women.


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THE ECONOMIC TIMES28 August 1993 VOL 33 NO 177


Spirit of the child

August 31 is the 123rd birth an-niversary of Maria Montessori, whosecreative genius has deeply influencededucational thinking worldwide. It isalso exactly 20 years from the death ofTarabai Modak, whose centenary wascelebrated last year. In her 50 yearsof active work, Tarabai ably adaptedMontessori’s ideas to bring about a mi-nor revolution in popular notions onchild development, child rearing andeducation.

Montessori stimulated a consider-able amount of original work in Indiaon early childhood education. Yet inthe competitive tussles of today’s aca-demic world, our pre-primary schoolshave degenerated to training childrento read, write and memorise in whatis hoped is the quickest possible way,so that the primary schools might geton with their job of imparting informa-tion.

But the power of ideas which orig-inated 150 years ago and the commit-ment of those who came under theirinfluence have kept the lamp alight inschools scattered throughout the coun-try: from posh Bombay suburbs tolowly tribal Balwadis.

Friedrich Froebel was the first tooutline a systematic method of edu-cating young children. He showed theimportance of learning through activ-ity and exploration of the environment,and he started, in 1837, the first ofseveral kindergarten schools in Ger-many. Froebel’s kindergartens wereviewed by the Prussian governmentas being too revolutionary, and wereeventually closed down. But his ideashad taken hold, and moved out intoEurope and the United states, wereChristians churches incorporated themin their parish work. It was Euro-pean missionaries who, towards theend of the nineteenth centaury, intro-duced kindergarten education into In-dia.

Next came Maria Montessori, theItalian medical doctor who started hereducational work with children classi-fied as mentally deficient. People wereamazed when these children were ableto pass the state reading and writ-ing exams for normal children. ButMontessori saw her result differently.She thought, if her “retarded” pupilscould compete with normal childrensimply after better teaching then thelatter must have, in effect, been ham-pered, “suffocated”, in their regular

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schools. If her educational meth-ods could be applied to normal chil-dren, the results would be even morestartling.

The central idea in Montessori’sphilosophy is that children take a nat-ural pleasure in learning to mastertheir environment, a process whichstarts with their manipulation of ob-jects. With this in mind, Montessoridesigned a series of educational toysthat would systematically develop thechild’s sense perceptions.

Montessori started, in 1907, a seriesof schools for slum children in Rome.Within a few years, the spectacularsuccess of these schools was known allover the world. During the SecondWorld War, Montessori came in In-dia, where between 1939 and 1949 shespent more than eight years.

Shri Girijashankar “Gijubhai”Badheka, the most devoted India cru-sader for Montessori, popularised hermethods throughout Gujarat and Ma-harashtra. But by his creative think-ing and commitment to adapting thissystem to the Indian culture, he alsobrought into focus the rather rigid anduncompromising attitude of Montes-sori herself, who objected to his useof her name. Eventually, the In-dian Montessori Society established byGijubhai was re-named “Nutan Bal-Shikshan Sangh”. Under the leader-ship of Smt. Tarabai Modak, it keptalive the Montessorian spirit while con-tinuing to do original work in the In-dian milieu.

The same dogmatic attitude takenby Montessori towards her followers inUSA led to the almost total extinc-tion of her methods in that country.Where her ideas did survive, they wereenshrined in the form of a closed cultrather than becoming part of the ed-ucational mainstream. The kind of

enthusiastic reception that Montessorireceived in India was unmatched any-where else in the world.

It was perhaps the mystical natureof Montessori’s belief, her view of ed-ucation as a process of liberating thespirit of the child, that found reso-nance in the Indian psyche. At thesame time, her very practical class-room methods, her stress on workingwith the hands, fitted in with Gand-hian ideals. Recently, the discoveryby cognitive psychologists of the closerelation between sense perception andcognition, and research on the crucialimportance of early experience for latedevelopment, has vindicated many ofMontessori’s ideas. In recent yearsMontessori has been rediscovered inAmerica.

Tarabai Modak’s experiments withMontessori led to the adaptation ofthese originally rather costly methodsto rural and tribal education. To-day, local materials like clay, wood,seeds, shells and dyes, and the cre-ations of village artisans, used in in-novative ways in Balwadis and Angan-wadis in Maharashtra.

Tatrabai’s most prominent contri-bution is perhaps her writings for chil-dren and adults. She translated diffi-cult concepts of child psychology intostories and anecdotes that seem as rev-elent today as they must have been halfa century ago. When Tatrabai startedwriting for children, the only literatureavailable in Marathi was for childrenabove eight years. Also, the trend wasto be either self-consciously moralisticor excessively informative. Tarabai’sstories and poems, written in spiritedMarathi with a sense of rhythm anddrama, have provided a model for laterwriters.

Today, if we are move willing to ac-cept children as competent human be-

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ings able to take on new challenges,and if we are more sensitive to theirearly educational needs, it is entirelydue to the efforts of these pioneers ofearly learning.


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THE ECONOMIC TIMES25 September 1993 VOL 33 No 204


Early, but correctly

Why send a three year-old child toschool? Educated parents are in nodoubt about the answer: their childmust have a early start. Primaryschools are clear too: their job is eas-ier if the child at entry is already pro-ficient in the basic skills. The “kinder-gartens” do their best to meet theseexpectations, while trying to imple-ment some version of their “principlesof early childhood education”.

But parents who are handed a stiffprogress-card and a sheet of paper out-lining next term’s syllabus for the Ju-nior KG, are sometimes left wonder-ing: is all this adding up, or are wejust caught up by some fad?

Experts say that two-thirds of ourultimate cognitive ability is formed bythe time we are six years old. Thisrapid intellectual development doesnot simply happen by a natural un-

folding of innate potential. It is crit-ically shaped by experiences in theearly childhood years: years which arealso crucial for the social and emo-tional development of the child. It isin these years that environmental fac-tors exert the strongest influence on achild’s development.

This is not to imply that externalfactors impact on a passively absorbinglearner. We learn by doing: by actingon the environment in a manner deter-mined by our innate potential. For theyoung child, such actions most ofteninvolve the manipulation of concreteobjects. Pre-school education is con-cerned with the kind of learning anddevelopment that occur in early child-hood, and the appropriate experiencewhich can help it along.

The most visible change in theearly years is physical growth, includ-ing an increasing control over one’sbody. The clumsy toddler who is con-stantly tripping, falling, and droppingthings, has to be transformed into acompetent, well coordinated five year-old.

On the island of Manus, Anthropol-ogist Margaret Mead observed childrenwho had to daily negotiate the dan-gerous waters of their lagoon homes.Seeing their physical agility and finelytuned sense-perceptions, Mead won-dered about the effects of experienceson sensory-motor development. Nei-ther high-rise flats nor city slums af-ford the kind of environment neces-sary for good physical development. A

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kindergarten with well-designed out-door equipment can try to make up forthis loss.

Along with the development oflarge motor abilities, comes controlover one’s finer actions. Even thetask of holding a pencil and movingit in a controlled fashion, needs pre-cise control over the hand muscles, anda co-ordination between eye and hand.The nursery school activities of puttingpegs in a pegboard, threading beads,molding clay, and fitting pieces of a jig-saw, are all useful for this.

Intelligence is described as an abil-ity to successfully adapt our actionsto the environment. There are manyfacets to this ability. Pre-school isthe time when children learn the con-cept of number, logical relationshipslike class-inclusion, geometrical ideasabout shapes, cause-effect relation-ships; they learn about living thingsaround them, about properties of ma-terials, the list could go on. This is thetime when children acquire the build-ing blocks of cognition, which theywill, in later life, organize into moreor less elaborate structures.

This is also the time when theylearn whether creative thinking is ac-ceptable to the society around them,or whether their jobs is to absorb andexactly reproduce what they are told.They learn to appreciate and to ex-press themselves through language, artand music.

A major aspect of cognitive devel-opment during infancy is the acqui-sition of language. The role of thepre-school teacher is to help childrenenrich their language, to enable themto express complex and abstract ideas.There is vast difference between an oraland a literate mode of language use.Through the medium of stories andrhymes, children learn about different

ways of using language, they learn toderive pleasure from words.

The best medium for all this is thechild’s mother tongue, or a second lan-guage in which the child is at ease froman early age. The rush for Englishmedium pre-schools, without a strongbackground of English at home, resultsin the child missing out on many of thecognitively and socially enriching expe-riences which she could have got fromeducation in the mother tongue.

There are many others things thatcan and should happen in a good pre-school. The development of person-ality characteristics like initiative andself-confidence, social skills like shar-ing and cooperation, moral other stan-dards for dealing with people around,are all part of the task for the pre-school.

These are all quite realistic ideaswhich have been implemented in dif-ferent forms. On a large scale, pre-school education was tried in the USAin the sixties and seventies, with theambitious aim of decreasing the socialgap in education opportunities. Titled“Project Head Start”, it was aimedat children from poor Black families.Early evaluations of the programmewere disappointing, but longer-termstudies showed that children involvedin the project had a higher rate ofschool completion, and better employ-ment prospects, than did a controlgroup of children.

India too has had a number of pio-neering experiments in early childhoodeducation. Yet, today, there are veryfew pre-schools which approach theideal. In big cities, nurseries are runin cramped rooms with little equip-ment and no realisation that profes-sional training is needed for pre-schoolteaching. Educational equipment re-mains shoddily produced and not eas-

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ily available.

We are seeing a disintegration ofthe traditional apparatus of early ed-ucation – the joint family and the vil-lage community – but as yet we haveevolved no substitute for it in the mod-

ern society.


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THE ECONOMIC TIMES24 July 1993 VOL 33 NO 142


Seat-of-the-pants physics

If you are reading these words,there is a good chance that you aregraduate, and a fair one that some timein your school or college career, youhave learnt about motion and New-ton’s laws of motion. The context isfamiliar enough; objects being pulled,pushed, thrown or left alone. Let usconsider some questions about throw-ing.

• You throw a ball straight up andcatch it as it comes down. Whatis the acceleration of the ball atits highest point?

• Is there a force on the ball, and inwhich direction, as it goes up, atthe highest point, and as it comesdown?

• You throw the ball straight up,but now facing forward in a

closed compartment of a uni-formly fast-moving train. Willthe ball fall back in your hands,or will it fall behind you or infront of you?

Whether or not you remember anyphysics right now, take a minute’spause to see what your intuition saysabout these questions. You will not bealone, for all over the world teachersand researchers are asking such ques-tions to school and college students, tophysics graduates and post-graduatesand to ordinary persons-on-the street.

The results are remarkable uni-form. Irrespective of their physics edu-cation most people think that the ball’saccelerations is zero at the top of itstrajectory, that the force acts in the di-rection of the ball’s motion (in the up-ward direction when moving up, zeroat the top, and in the downward di-rection as the ball comes down), andthat the ball thrown straight up in-side a uniformly moving train will landbehind the thrower, as the train hasmoved forward since the time it wasthrown.

Such ideas are close to those heldby philosophers three hundred yearsbefore Newton. Even today, studentshave similar intuitive theories aboutmotion which are contradicted, but notfundamentally challenged, by schoollearning.

In fact, the acceleration of a ballthrown upwards is constant through-out its flight. Once the ball leaves

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your hand, the only force acting on itis gravity, which always acts straightdown, whether the ball at that momenthappens to be going up, down, or side-ways. Another minor force is air re-sistance which – for a ball that is notspinning – acts in the direction oppo-site to its current direction of motion.

Why then do people consistentlyimagine that the force is in the di-rection of the motion? Part of theanswer might lie in the fact that thesimplest (school) examples of Newton’slaws occur in an idealised frictionlessworld, where moving objects with noforce acting on them keep on movingin straight lines. In the real world,which is full of friction, an object withno force acting on it apparently comesto rest. It is natural to infer from thisexperience that anything which is mov-ing must have a force acting on it in thedirection of its motion: like the whim-sical spaceship in a science-fiction filmwhich coasts at constant velocity withits rockets firing continuously.

But, imperfections of the real worldapart, sometimes our mind seems to re-ject even what the eye can see clearly.

The correct answer for the ballthrown up in a moving train is that,even after it has left your hand, theball continues to move forward withthe same velocity as that of you andthe train; so it falls right back in yourhand, and not behind you, as mostpeople imagine. This counter-intuitivebehaviour has foxed many a novicefootball player who misjudges the di-rection of a pass.

One interpretation is that such amistake results from visual illusion.Studies in the perception of motionshow that when an object is viewedagainst a moving frame of reference, itstrajectory with respect to that frame ismis-perceived as being one relative to

a stationary frame of reference. Evenwhen we ourselves are in a movingframe (that is, running, or inside atrain, we remain mentally bound to theground).

Naıve theories, as I wrote in thiscolumn in January, must occur notonly in physics, but in all areas, sinceour everyday experience with the worldis being constantly interpreted by aninvisible, active mind. Clearly teach-ing must in the some way take ac-count of intuitive ways of thinking. Ateacher who knows of the lurking pre-conceptions of students can start byhelping them get their ideas out in theopen. What is needed is a restructur-ing of the students’ existing knowledge,rather than simply imparting new in-formation. Thus the traditional lin-ear presentation of the subject mat-ter must be replaced by one structuredto maximize linkages, between relatedconcepts, between chapters of the samebook, between what has been learntthis year and the previous years, be-tween different subject areas, and be-tween the text book and life experi-ence.

Another successful instructionalstrategy, deriving from computers, isto present knowledge not in a “declara-tive” but in a “procedural” form. Mostpresent teaching is declarative, that is,we give descriptive definitions whichwe ask students to remember. A pro-cedural definition, in contrast, wouldspecify the steps to follow in order toconstruction an instance of the con-cept.

To teach about “force”, one wouldtry to come up with instructions invarious contexts: how would you tellwhether there is a force acting on agiven object? How can you feel, or ap-ply force physically? How would youmeasure a force? How would you showit in a “vector diagram?” How would

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you write an equation for it, and so on.Briefly, one tries to go from “knowingthat”, to “knowing how”. In doing so,one ensures that hands-on experiencetakes precedence over rote learning.


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THE ECONOMIC TIMES30 October 1993


Foundation in concrete

Abstractions are the stuff of sci-ence. In everyday life we might ex-perience things as hot and cold, butthe “heat” in physics cannot be felt. Itis an intangible entity that flows, butlacks the familiar properties of matter,is not sensed by a thermometer and isonly written in mysterious equations.

Innumerable such abstract ideaslike work, gravity, valency, ecosys-tem, evolution, occur in school science.Mathematics of course has a rich reper-toire. Ideas like operations, functionsand solution sets are highly abstract,say teachers, and most students aresimply unable to grasp such abstractconcepts.

This view is confirmed by experi-ence. Teachers’ repeated explanationsof these difficult concepts do not help.At most, students are able to remem-ber definitions and rules and those too,just long enough to pass examinations.Ask them about it a few months later,

and you are met with blank stares.

Research into students’ learningshows that indeed students have trou-ble with abstract concepts in science.But they also have a strategy for deal-ing with them. What they do is to sub-stitute the original abstract idea witha plausible concrete model. For ex-ample, students spontaneously think ofboth electric current and heat as flow-ing fluids.

However, this kind of substitutionleads to misunderstandings. If currentis a fluid, how can it be both conservedas it circulates, and yet wear out in thebattery? Research done at the HomiBhabha Centre for Science Educationhas shown up a number of such mis-conceptions with students in Bombayschools.

When the textbook says that theearth acts like a magnet, students con-clude that there is a large magnetburied inside the earth. They think oflight rays bumping against each other.Even college students, in trying to un-derstand the abstract notion of “frameof reference”, imagine it to be a phys-ical space, defined by the extension ofparticular objects. As a result, theycome to absurd conclusions in whichframes of reference collide, fragmentand merge.

In biology, this research finds stu-dents replacing the abstract idea ofDarwinian evolution by a concreteLamarckian notion, in which the envi-ronment directly affects physiological

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characteristics. It is easier to imag-ine the giraffe getting a long neck byhaving to stretch himself towards highbranches than to think of ideas likevariation and natural selection.

Does all this mean that most stu-dents are incapable of learning abstractconcepts?

Such a conclusion is perhaps toohasty. For over a hundred years now,anthropologists and psychologists havetried to demonstrate that primitive,pre-industrial societies lack the capac-ity for abstract thought. But they haverepeatedly found that although “prim-itive” people might fail on formal tests,they show very subtle reasoning in ar-eas of their own experience.

Consider some abstractions whichwe make in our daily lives. We talkabout systems like the political system,the bureaucracy, the transport system.Uneducated farmers are able to makecost-benefit analyses; stock market in-vestors habitually use complex ideaslike price/earnings ratio and net assetvalue. Any one of these abstract con-cepts is understood and developed intoits nature from over a period of monthsor years.

For example, around the age ofseven to eight years, there is a ma-jor shift in the ways in which chil-dren describe other people. While ear-lier they used highly concrete cate-gories like age, sex, physical appear-ance and routine habits, they now startto use more abstract and inferentialcategories like personality traits, mo-tives and attitudes. As they growolder, these notions become even moresophisticated, to include explanationsof behaviour and situational variables.

Why is it that the sophisticationseen in, say, an understanding of hu-man personality, is not seen in under-standing of science?

The answer lies in experience.From childhood, we have had exten-sive experiences of dealing with differ-ent kinds of human personalities. Wemake a large number of observations,develop our own theories of behaviour,experimentally test out these theoriesand continually modify them.

In contrast, theories and abstrac-tions of science and mathematics aredoled out to us ready-made. We do nothave a chance to see them in action,to question them, to test them, and toform our own judgements. If this pro-cess were to start early enough in pri-mary school, the density of conceptsexperienced in the later classes wouldnot seem so overwhelming. This callsnot only for better curriculum plan-ning, but a higher quality of trainingand resources for teachers.

When students invent their ownconcrete models, they are making thebest of the given situation. In fact,they are doing what most scientistsdo when they develop new constructsor try to understand old ones. WhenMichael Faraday introduced “lines offorce” to express the arrangement ofmagnetic forces, he did not confinehimself to abstractions. He actuallythought of the lines as stretched stringswhich could vibrate, expand and con-tract; and this idea helped him to con-ceptualise electromagnetic induction.

If the students’ models are inade-quate compared to those of scientists,it is simply because they are based oninsufficient knowledge. They do notinclude the essential elements of thephysical reality which they aim to de-scribe. It needs a great deal of inge-nuity to invent models which are closeto reality, which are not so abstractas to incomprehensible nor so simpli-fied as to be meaningless. Again, stu-dents need to discuss to what extentany model deals with a given problem,

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and what its limitations are. Fortu-nately, with the beginnings of popularscience writing in India, a few authorshave started to tackle this problem.


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THE ECONOMIC TIMES27 November 1993 VOL 33 NO 266


Mother of all tongues

Should technical subjects be taughtin the mother-tongue? This is highlyemotive, sometimes explosive issue. Ithas been discussed, debated, ignoredand exploited for many years now. Re-cently, during the annual ’Founder’sDay’ celebrations at the Tata Insti-tute of Fundamental Research (mark-ing Dr. Homi Bhabha’s birth anniver-sary), this topic was selected for a pop-ular debate. As expected, emotionsran high, sometimes eclipsing the realeducational issues.

The problem is a complex one, es-pecially in the context of a plural,multi-lingual society like ours. At thepopular level, it is often seen as a con-flict between emotional and pragmaticthinking. The arguments in favour ofthe mother-tongue see language as atool for oppression, and stress the needfor preserving one’s cultural heritage.The counter-arguments are concerned

with practical difficulties of implemen-tation and of translating the alreadyoverflowing technical literature into allthe regional languages of India.

Both sides, unfortunately, perceiveEnglish medium education to be anintrinsically superior alternative, sinceit appears to open up an attractiverange of career opportunities. Stu-dents from vernacular medium schoolsrightly complain that when technicalsubjects are taught in English, theyare at a disadvantage vis-a-vis English-medium students. It is the latter whoget the coveted seats, who corner jobs,and generally get ahead. But no onecould seriously believe that the socialinequities which lie at the root of thisproblem, could be wiped out by mak-ing English accessible to everyone.

On the other hand, there are anynumber of research studies which showthat concept formation is most soundthought the mother-tongue. Learninghappens best when it builds on naturalthought modes of the child. Childrenwho are forced to learn in an unfamil-iar language, not only develop negativeattitudes towards school, but also lagbehind in their understanding. Lack oflanguage fluency results in a tendencytowards rote learning. In exams, thesestudents look for key-words and recallanswers from memory, rather than try-ing to analyse the questions put tothem.

The interaction in the classroomalso suffers, as teachers generally lackthe skill to conduct meaningful discus-

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sions in their second language, whilestudents are unable to express theirown ideas clearly. In a linguisticallymixed classroom, teachers (inadver-tently) pay less attention to studentswho lack language proficiency. Whenthey do interact, the studies show, it isin a managerial rather than an instruc-tional mode.

Children become fluent in two lan-guages if exposed to both of them sys-tematically from birth. In fact, suchchildren enjoy far-reaching cognitiveadvantages in later life. But if the sec-ond language is introduced at the ageof 7-8 years, before the first languageis learnt perfectly, then both languagessuffer. A better strategy is to start thesecond language at about 10 years ofage, after the first language is well de-veloped.

Language ability is crucial to learn-ing maths and science. Many recentschool programs have found that whenthe teaching of language is linked tosymbolic skills, students become bet-ter at mathematics. The traditionalnotion that ’arts’ subjects require lan-guage proficiency, while ’science’ sub-jects do not, has been discredited byresearch.

Educationists have long realisedthe importance of learning throughthe mother-tongues. But the Indiansystem of education, due to its am-bivalence of purpose, has ignored thissound principle. Almost 160 yearsago, Lord Macaulay laid out for usthe policy of imparting western knowl-edge through English for the elite mi-nority. Since then, starting from theHunter Commission of 1882, variouscommittees and commissions on edu-cation have recommended giving pri-ority to school education in the re-gional languages. The All India Uni-versities Conference in 1939 and theUniversity Grant Commission in 1960

argued for education in the mother-tongue till the degree level. But theghost of Macaulay continues to reignover us. Our policy makers, and worsestill, the common people strongly be-lieve in the basic inadequacy of Indianlanguages.

It is clear that at scientific researchlevel, in commercial, financial, diplo-matic and other spheres calling for na-tional and international transactions,the use of regional languages wouldbe impractical. English is essential asthe link language, and it needs to betaught, in the right way and at theright age. But, as a second or thirdlanguage, English will always remainan inadequate vehicle for meaningfullearning.

The question is whether we cancontinue to give our children suchhighly adequate tools of learning. Allresearch in this area shows that atleast one well-developed language is es-sential for learning any subject. Atpresent, most of our children, eventhose in elite English-medium schools,know how two or three languages, butnone of them well enough to expressthemselves on any subject with clarity.

Our schools for mass education –the government-run schools – do of-fer education in regional languages.Degree-level education in regional lan-guages is also available, particularly innon-metropolitan areas. But in anysociety, it is the elites who set normsand if they look on regional languagesas a second rate option, then so dothe masses. In striving to attain theideal English education, they irrepara-bly damage any spark of creativity inchildren. At the same time, the re-gional language schools suffer the ef-fects of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Theyeither remain inadequately equipped,or get taken over by narrow sectarianinterests.

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The vast change in public percep-tion is needed if our educational sys-tem is to throw up a reasonable num-ber of genuinely original and creativeindividuals, who can hold their own ina fast-changing world order.


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THE ECONOMIC TIMES25 December 1993 VOL 33 NO 294


Toying with bright ideas

It’s Santa Claus time. Kids all overthe world, in anticipation and excite-ment, are opening up assorted pack-ages rustled up for their enjoymentor education. In India too, this is abusy period for the toy industry, whichhas seen more changes in the last twodecades than at any time before.

At the heart of the change is thefact that urban parents have becomemore discriminating. Instead of casu-ally buying a doll or a toy car as apresent, they are looking for quality,for novelty, and above all, for that elu-sive ’educational value’. Toy manufac-turers too are responding to the de-mand. Educational toys range fromthose designed to prepare children forthe all important preschool interviewto those aimed at young adolescent’scientists and engineers’.

Educational toys and games gener-

ally conform to a certain kind of stereo-type. The popular, but misguided,view is that they should teach impor-tant facts, and supplant academic dis-ciplines with more palatable forms oflearning. Few children are taken in bysuch window dressing, and after sizingup the new educational toy, they re-turn to their Barbie Doll or GI Joe.

Today’s well-to-do parents arespending more money then ever be-fore on toys. But they often find thatinstead of playing with these expen-sive and sophisticated toys, childrenoccupy themselves with odds and endsthat would have otherwise been con-signed to the garbage. This is notmerely a perverse lack of appreciationof the good things that their parentshave worked hard to get. Rather, chil-dren instinctively look for playthingsthat provide the maximum stimula-tion. Smooth edged plastic toys, orcuddly soft ones, simply do not pro-vide the variety of sensations and expe-riences that sticks and seeds, or shellsand feathers do. Pre-fabricated assem-bly kits do not allow much scope for achild’s inventiveness. Whatever inter-esting toys there are available on themarket, tend to be replicas of thosefound in the West, and often bad onesat that.

In recent years, some voluntarypopular science initiatives in India, likethe Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishadand Eklavya in Madhya Pradesh, havetried to develop and propagate ed-ucational toys. Two of the most

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creative and prolific developers havebeen Arvind Gupta, a Delhi-basedfreelance educator, and SudarshanKhanna of the National Institute ofDesign, Ahmedabad. While the for-mer works on scientific toys, the lat-ter is more concerned with conveyingprinciples of design through toys. Bothmake use of ordinary materials like oldnewspapers, matchboxes, broomsticksand even discarded rubber chappals, tomake ingenious gizmos. Khanna hasbuilt up a collection of traditional toysmade by children from different partsof India. These designs use local mate-rials and they have been passed downand perfected by generations of chil-dren. Usually ignored by parents, thetoys have genuine educational signifi-cance. Spring loaded carts, whirligigsand whistles, can be used to illustratescientific principles, and to understandproperties of materials. Khanna pointsout that the process of planning andconstructing a simple dynamic toy candevelop a high level of skill in children.

This intuitive idea is supported byrecent research in knowledge and cog-nition. Most people imagine thatthere is a clear distinction betweentheoretical thinking, characteristic ofphilosophers and scientists, and prac-tical work of arisans. However, theway that different thought-modes de-velop, particularly in children, is actu-ally through a variety of manual ac-tions. In the act of constructing, chil-dren learn to think.

When the 17th century Englishphilosopher, John Locke, propagatedthe powerful notion of “teachingthrough sport”, he provided the ra-tionale for the first toys manufacturedspecifically for children. However, toysas a folk art form have been aroundsince antiquity. India has a tradition of

these toys, which are sold at street cor-ners and local ’melas’. Unfortunately,these toys are made from scrap ma-terials, and often they are unsafe be-cause of sharp edges, rusted metal, ortoxic paints. But Khanna, who hascatalogued toys and learnt from toy-makers, finds that many innovative de-sign ideas are employed here, some ofwhich are dying out.

Often, traditional toy makers be-long to the lower rungs of society andthey carry out their jobs as a routineeconomic necessity. In the absence ofany appreciation of their craft and in-centive to develop new designs, theycontinue to use ideas evolved perhapshundreds of years ago. But if providedwith resources, they ought to be ableto contribute to development of toysof educational value. This process hasalready happened in Europe and US,where inventive toys of local craftsmenwere taken up in an organised way ofcrafts councils for mass manufactureby private entrepreneurs. In India, wehave clever, but badly produced localtoys gradually losing out to cheap plas-tic ones, while the upmarket fare dis-plays a curious poverty of ideas.

Our vast numbers of school-children could become willing partic-ipants in any enterprise to preserveand revitalise this important sector.A start could be made with the craftclasses in schools by providing incen-tives for development of new designs.Both the toy industry and the edu-cational establishment have a role toplay here.


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THE ECONOMIC TIMES22 January 1994


Knowing the world, naturally

The launch of the Sputnik in 1957triggered off an intense questioningof educational standards in the USA,eventually leading to a worldwidemovement for curriculum reform inschool science. The movement was ledby prominent scientists, who insistedthat the manner in which school sci-ence and mathematics were taught wascompletely wrong. Traditional teach-ing methods encouraged rote memori-sation of facts, whereas science is re-ally a process of enquiry, a method ofdiscovering the natural world. Whatcould be a better ideal then, thanteaching science through discovery?

The scenario of an ideal discovery-learning classroom is one where theteacher is no longer the sole arbiterof knowledge, but only a guide andhelper. Teacher and students togetherraise questions, design and carry out

investigations, discuss and analyse theresults, and draw their own conclu-sions. The aim is not to learn facts,but to acquire the tools of learning.

These curriculum development ef-forts in different countries were di-rected and executed by some very pres-tigious scientists. The books whichcame out were of high quality and in-corporated many innovative ideas inteaching. But when it came to theimplementation of the ideal scenarioin typical classrooms, several problemsarose.

Perhaps it is difficult to encapsu-late discovery experiences into simplecurriculum packages. Only a small mi-nority of students and teachers took tothe new materials; the majority did notsee the point of learning through dis-covery. The process of experimenta-tion involves formulating hypotheses,seeing the relevance of different vari-ables, knowing which of the severaloutcomes to observe, and finally, ar-guing about the interpretation of thefindings. Even most teachers, de-spite training programmes, were ill-equipped to handle such complex sit-uations.

The sad fact is, that there is nopanacea to the problem of teaching.The discovery approach turned outto be highly dependent on the back-ground and learning styles of indi-vidual students and teachers. Thoseteachers who were not at ease withthe sudden freedom forced upon them,went back to teaching the new materi-

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als in their old ways, emphasising rotememorization of the results of “inves-tigations”. For the students too, it be-came the old game of guessing what“results” they were supposed to get, orwhat was the answer that the teacherwanted them to “find out”. If theexperiment did not work – that is ifit gave unexpected results – teacherswere forced to tell students the correctanswer, thus furthering an authoritar-ian image of science, one that the newmethods had been specifically designedto counter.

The emphasis on science as a pro-cess of enquiry was surely a healthycounter to the older fact-centred ap-proach. But when done with the kindof apostolic fervour that it was, itswung the pendulum too far in theother direction. Students tended to be-come sceptical of anything that theirteachers told them, and to disbelieveeven generally accepted scientific facts.The insistence on teaching everythingthrough inquiry sometimes made thecurriculum too contrived.

The idea that one can find out ev-erything for one’s self, holds within itcertain assumptions about knowledge,about science, and about learning. Itassumes that knowledge is unprob-lematic, and can be obtained simplyby unbiased observation and correctapplication of the scientific method.This view has long since been rejectedby philosophers of science, who havepointed out that observations madeby scientists are always influenced bytheir theoretical expectations. This isequally true of students, whose “ob-servations” often only reinforce theirprior misconceptions. The philosophybehind the inquiry approach (in itsdogmatic form) is therefore, basicallyflawed.

Perhaps the most heavily criticizedaspect of the new curricula was that

the highly qualified scientists who de-veloped them had little experienceof school teaching. Although someamount of field testing of the materi-als was carried out, and teachers andadministrators were supposed to pro-vide feedback, these inputs did not suf-ficiently influence the content of thecurricula.

The Indian experience, though sim-ilar in essence, has not been so welldocumented. In the early years afterthe founding of the National Councilfor Educational Research and Train-ing (NCERT) in 1961, some of theAmerican curricula were tried out withIndian students, with little success.Their drawback was a heavy overload-ing of content, and dependence on anexpensive kit of apparatus which couldonly be supplied while aid from UN-ESCO was forthcoming. In the nextcurricular revision, the emphasis ondiscovery as well as the factual over-load was reduced. The NCERT cur-ricula of the 1980s tried to combinegiving information with an activity-based approach. The states are ex-pected to produce local-level adapta-tions of these curricula.

One prominent effort at devel-oping school curriculum based onthe discovery approach has been theHoshangabad Science Teaching Pro-gramme (HSTP) in Madhya Pradesh.This programme, initiated in 1972,covers rural and small town schoolsin some selected districts of MP. TheHSTP textbooks are well designed andtake careful account of the local en-vironment. In this sense, they repre-sent a significant improvement over thecurrent stock of science curricula. Anenquiry-oriented approach is also per-haps indispensable to offset the stiflingauthoritarianism of our school system.But the same approach should be usedto examine curriculum innovation it-

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self, lest we have to choose between onedogma and another.

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The author is with the Homi BhabhaCentre for Science Education, Bom-bay. This column appears once amonth.

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THE ECONOMIC TIMES26 March 1994


Of mindless pendatism

They form about a tenth of India’spopulation and retain a treasure ofindigenous knowledge, technology andart. But, in the name of planned de-velopment. We have destroyed theirhabitats and driven them to povertyand despair.

Indian tribals are diverse groupsliving in different hilly and forested re-gions of the country. The term “tribe”was introduced by the British and wasformalized in the Indian Constitutionwhen certain areas were declared tobe “tribal areas”. The importance ofthe tribal areas for the British gov-ernment arose from their need to ex-ploit the forests for rail-road and ship-building. The Forest Department wasstarted in 1864, with the avowed aim ofcontrolling the reckless felling of treesby private contractors. Soon after, theState’s monopoly right over the forestswas imposed. As a result, the tribals,

who had for centuries enjoyed free ac-cess to natural resources, suddenly be-came law-breakers in their own hand.

Under the protection of the admin-istration, traders and money-lendersestablished themselves in the forests.They were followed by settlers who,through outright violence, trickery andbribing of local officials, acquired legalrights to the tribals’ land. The storywas repeated all over India with a fewexceptions, as in the North-East.

The movement to bring educationto the tribals came first from theBritish government. It arose moreas a response to the “law and or-der” problems in tribal areas, thanfrom any liberal humanitarian com-mitments. Later, under the influenceof Mahatma Gandhi, many Congressworkers entered tribal villages to worktowards improving their conditions.In Gujarat and Maharashtra, Gand-hian social workers established Ashramschools for basic (craft-based) educa-tion. Although, the Gandhian pat-tern of education was not accepted inthe national policy, these Ashram sha-las, as public residential schools, cameto form the basis of the Indian gov-ernment’s programme for tribal educa-tion. Residential schooling might ap-pear to be a rather expensive proposi-tion for mass education, but it is mostappropriate in the tribal context. Be-sides, tribal settlements are small andscattered over large areas in hilly ter-rains. A school catering to severalsettlements requires students to travel

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many kilometers every day, while lo-cal single-teacher schools need to haveteachers willing to commute daily tothem. During the monsoons, overflow-ing streams and rivulets make manyof the settlements completely unap-proachable.

The absence of effective water-management schemes affects educa-tion in more ways than one. Tribalschools have some of the highest ratesof dropout. A large part of the drop-out occur in the beginning of the aca-demic year, which happens to coincidewith the peak agricultural season atthe onset of the monsoons. A naturalsolution would be to have the schoolsrunning through the summer months,and break for vacation in the mon-soons. But summer is when all the wa-ter sources dry up, forcing the residen-tial schools to close down. Literacy inmany tribal communities is as low asfive percent. Economically, it makesmore sense to the parents to have theirchildren to help at home, work in thefields, collect firewood, fetch water, ortake the cattle out to graze, than havethem engaged in schooling which canprovide only long-term and highly un-certain gains.

All this is the down side. Its con-sequence is that tribals are seen asdisadvantaged communities in need ofdevelopment, or “uplift”. In schools,the performance of tribal students ismarkedly below that of non-tribalswho might be studying in the sameclass. Most teachers tend to believethat these students suffer real cognitivedeprivation which makes formal schoolsubjects difficult for them to grasp.

But recently, it is being realisedthat tribals societies have some realstrengths, in terms of extensive ecolog-ical knowledge, and customs and prac-tices of enduring survival value. Evenschool students have intimate knowl-edge of hundreds of plant and animal

species in their environment: knowl-edge which not only surpasses that oftheir teachers, but in many ways com-petes with what professional biologistsknow. The irony is that in school, thisknowledge is completely ignored, andstudents are forced to learn a kind ofbiology which divorced from their ownexperiences. Those tribal children whomanage to beat the system, do so atthe expense of losing their own knowl-edge for a kind of superficial learning,that barely gets them the lowest-paidjobs in the hierarchy.

Research with traditional commu-nities in India and Australia has shownthat they have well-developed learningstyles, different from formal learningstyles expected in school. For example,learning of skills in aboriginal commu-nities is done through observation, im-itation, and practice in real situations.Complex skills like carpet weaving aretransmitted through highly functionalsystems of encoding. The contrastingverbal, sequential, fragmented and de-contextualised style of a normal schoolcurriculum does not fit in with this tra-ditional method.

Tribal education should, therefore,not be seen merely as one of provid-ing a social service to a deprived anddispossessed community. Rather, it isa question of enabling the tribals, whoalready possess valuable knowledge, torelate to the modern world that theyare increasingly coming into contactwith. Their knowledge is vital not justto their own survival, but to the eco-logical health of the nation. It is thelast remaining resource which is trulytheirs, and only in their own empower-ment lies its conservation.


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THE ECONOMIC TIMES23 April 1994


Lessons in boredom

Come the new school year and stu-dents will return with an arm-load ofnew textbooks. They might first grabthe language books, and read themthrough till the end. Other books mayget a cursory reading, while the restwould get a bored first look, sealingtheir fate for the rest of the year.

Textbooks are the pivot aroundwhich revolve all aspects of schoollearning. The content and style of thetextbook essentially determines class-room teaching, and sets the norms forexaminations. It is the teacher’s soleresource, particularly where librariesand laboratories do not exist.

The vast scale of textbook produc-tion in India makes it a potentiallylucrative target for the private pub-lishing industry. It also means thatpublic debate on textbooks gets fo-cused on their production and distri-bution aspects, while quality consider-ations are left to the authors. Nonethe-less, the 1960s recommendations of the

Kothari Commission to strengthen thestate textbook production machineryhad the salutary effect of eliminatingthe “textbook racket” of those days,and ensuring a (bare) minimum levelof quality.

Having said that, today’ Indiantextbooks leave much to be desired.Take the case of science and mathe-matics. Despite many rounds of revi-sions at national and state levels, ma-jority of books produced remain dryand uninteresting, unrelated to thelives of the students they are supposedto communicate with. It is not thatgood intentions are lacking. State-ments of curriculum objectives, whichare often quoted by textbook writers,include such laudable one as, awak-ening curiosity about nature, and en-couraging logical thinking in children.Paradoxically, not a trace of any ex-citement about the subject can begleaned from the body of the textbook.

Textbook writing committees atthe national level have lately had astrong representation from prominentscientists around the country. The re-sults, in terms of the quality of booksproduced, have been uneven. The con-tribution of even top professionals de-pends on the amount of time and at-tention that they choose to give to thejob. The deceptive simplicity of thecontent for an expert, hides the factthat a lot of work is needed to write agood textbook.

Writers often look at school text-books as merely diluted versions of

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advanced textbooks. But, books forstudents need to address the stu-dents’ prior knowledge and sponta-neously formed conceptions in the sub-ject area, anticipating common areas ofdifficulty. This needs a rare sensitiv-ity to what makes sense to students,rather that what seem like arbitraryor contrived facts. For example, theexcessively formal approach adoptedby most mathematics textbooks takeslittle cognisance of students’ naturalways of thinking.

A common problem with textbooksis their lack of coherence and integra-tion. Even concepts within a subjectarea are not linked together, while link-ages across subject areas are practi-cally non-existent.

In the rush to introduce a largenumber of concepts at an earlier stage,one sometimes loses sight of the limitsset by the cognitive level of students.Abstract ideas like forces and ratios aretaught without taking care to see thatthey are appropriate to that age-groupof students, or sufficiently anchored inthe concrete experiences available tothem.

A major reason for the steril-ity of textbooks lies in the equallysterile examination system that theyare tailored to. Various pressuregroups of both parents and teachershave dictated that the examinationsbe formula-driven, totally predictable,and answerable by sheer rote learn-ing. The textbooks therefore, empha-sise definitions, questions with short,meaningless answers, and proceduresthat can be learnt by rote. In mathe-matics this has a particularly devastat-ing effect, that problems are not seenas interesting and challenging as theycould be, but as rigid procedures to bememorized.

The examination system has alsohad the effect that in the primary sec-tions, facts are minimized, for fear that

they will constitute a load on youngminds. On the other hand, middle andsecondary students are loaded withthe most intricate and obscure piecesof information which presumably, arenow within their capacity to memorise.Anyone who has observed young chil-dren would know that from the earli-est age, they are hungry for new in-formation about the world. The spe-cific pieces of information are not thatimportant: one child may be inter-ested in knowing all about birds, whileanother may be interested in trains.The point is that they enjoy facts, andshould be encouraged to acquire them;for facts, in later years, form the basisfor abstractions. The system has to al-low for this, through project work andsupplementary handbooks for teach-ers, even though the results would notbe amenable to formal examinations.

Given the reality that teachers donot have sufficient resources availableto them, handbooks which suggestgood teaching approaches, and give ad-ditional information, are an absolutenecessity. The present teachers’ hand-books merely discuss time manage-ment and order of teaching the topics,without giving any substantive ideas.Recently, the Maharashtra Bureau ofTextbook Production has started toremedy the situation.

Finally, it would be well worth thecost to produce textbooks in an attrac-tive format. The authors could lightenup a little, inject some humour, somecartoons, without necessarily talkingdown to students. Government sub-sidy or private sponsorship of better-produced books is not too much to askfor generation of better educated chil-dren.


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THE ECONOMIC TIMES28 May 1994


No budding Einsteins here

In December 1991, when Newsweekbrought out a cover story on the topten schools in the world, they selecteda Tokyo school to be the best in scienceteaching. “Weary of buying Americanideas”, said the headline, “Japan willgrow its own”.

Science education in Japan has formany years been the envy of the West-ern world. Japanese students ace in-ternational tests in science and math-ematics, and the level of technical so-phistication in the general populationsurpasses that anywhere else. It there-fore comes as a surprise when an edito-rial in the Mainichi Daily News, a na-tional newspaper in Japan, proclaims acrisis in science education. The reasonfor concern is a joint statement issuedrecently by the Japan Physical Soci-ety of Applied Physics and the Societyof Physics Education, stating in effectthat science education in Japan is onthe verge of dying.

The indicators are many. Appli-cants for university science and tech-nology faculties have been reducingover the years. Polls find that as stu-dents progress through school, they be-come less and less interested in sci-ence. The qualifications of universityentrants have steadily deteriorated.And in an apparently retrograde move,recent revisions of school curriculumhave drastically cut the time allocatedto science. How does one understandsuch trends in the world’s most suc-cessful educational system?

During the American occupationfollowing Japan’s defeat in World WarII, the education system was com-pletely overhauled, with the aim ofremoving militaristic and nationalis-tic tendencies. School bureaucraciesare decentralised, and the curriculumrestructured according to the Ameri-can model. Like other such social andtechnological transplants, these West-ern ideas were deftly remoulded by theJapanese into a new distinctively in-digenous system. In this system nowthere ius almost 100 percent literacy(in the Kanji script of more than 5000characters!) and 94 percent of all chil-dren complete high school. The recentWorld Bank report has highlighted thewisdom of the Japanese policy of egal-itarian co-educational schooling in thefirst nine years, followed by an in-tensely meritocratic system of highereducation.

But there have been problems,the most publicised one being that

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of young people driven by relentlessacademic competition. The pressureof nationwide entrance exams of highschools and colleges takes its toll onstudents leading, in extreme cases, toviolence and suicide. It is true thatadolescents the world over are vulner-able to extreme mental tension. Butwhen the source of tension lies withinsuch a highly organized and controlledsystem, it becomes obligatory for thesystem to do something about it.

This the Japanese Ministry of Ed-ucation has been trying: the recentcurricular revisions represent an efforttowards school life a little more re-laxed for students. To this end, thescience and social studies courses forthe lower elementary grades have beenintegrated into a new subject, called“Daily life”. And starting from JuniorHigh School, students are offered elec-tive courses in science and humanities.

The science faculties in universi-ties are, however, worried that suchreforms will lead to a further driftaway from S & T and this worry is atthe root of the joint statement by thethree societies. Besides the reductionin number of students taking up S &T, there are also now few S & T grad-uate opting for employment in manu-facturing industries. High school stu-dents who love manipulating machinesand working with personal computershave been selecting humanities and so-cial science careers; all this during aperiod when manufacturing industrieshave been at the height of prosperity!The migration of students away from S& T is therefore something of a para-dox.

An interesting analysis of this phe-nomenon has been carried out by Prof.Shin’ichi Kobayashi of the Universityof Electro-communications. He consid-ered peoples’ attitude towards S & Tto be a mediator between the ameni-

ties offered by S & T, and their de-sire to be scientists or engineers. Heanalysed the model empirically, usingresults of surveys. The model showedan increase over time in the number ofpeople with high receptivity towards S& T products and low concern about S& T activities. This growing group ofpeople, whom Prof. Kobayashi named“Savages in a civilized society”, tendto take for granted the fruits of tech-nology.

The technological nature ofJapanese society is a mixed blessingfor school education. Prof. MasakataOgawa of the Ibaraki University says,although school students manipulatea number of gadgets, they never getto experience how such complicatedmechanical things are made. Sincemost everyday equipments contain ICchips, their working is far from trans-parent; if they stop working, theyhave to thrown away. In elementaryschools, children work with electricitysets that include small solar batter-ies. Such “science sets” containingstandardised parts, are often used inexperiments which amount to simplyassembling components in a prescribedplan. Experiments using computersoftware translate into manipulatingmoving screens. Which shows how in-dispensable real world experiences, or,“touching, smelling and listening”, areto scientific observation.

The Mainichi article also gives abizarre story of a schoolboy who, whenhis pet beetle stopped moving, said,“Let’s change the battery”. That is afitting parable for education, enmeshedas it is within the complex dynamics ofevery social system. It will not workright by simply changing the battery.

—————————————-The author is with the Homi BhabhaCentre for Science Education, Bom-bay.

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