Are we teaching too much – II
In our previous column, the emphasis was laid on concerns in the contemporary higher education system, with a focus on classroom management, underlining the need to rescue our students from excessive classroom lectures. The teacher too is to be rescued from what is called as ‘closed mental model of learning’. Higher education is of great concern for individuals, markets, and governments because its beneficiaries are to occupy positions of power in politics, administration, business, and civil society. It is both a public and a private good.
As a public good, we expect our students to be enlightened citizens and compassionate people who can be catalysts in promoting harmony in society. All leading economies are revamping higher education. There may be cynicism in old centers such as the USA and UK, but in emerging new destinations like Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Australia, there is much to emulate. But first things first: how can we make the classroom space more egalitarian, democratic, and harmonious? This needs more discussion.
Teacher Training
Many of my friends and students have raised concerns regarding faculty training and how teachers are poorly equipped to teach, although many possess sufficient subject knowledge which is not being effectively transferred to students. We don’t have any academic instruments to identify at the entry level the most effective teacher. Teaching is an ethically and intellectually demanding profession, and all commissions and committees in pre- and post-independent India have recommended teacher training, which, of course, needs a separate discussion.
The selection criteria for faculty at college and university levels are NET or PhD with some publications. But teaching is more than degrees, publications, and research projects. It involves passion, patience, pleasure, painstaking effort, punctuality, positivity, and practice. As of today, the one institutional mechanism for teacher training is the Human Resource Development Centers in universities (formerly Academic Staff Colleges, established in 1987). These need to be taken to the next level, keeping in view challenges of change in policy, economy, and society. We can also learn from global best practices.
Midwifery Metaphor
In a recent article, an accomplished scholar employed the metaphor of a “midwife”, who does not deliver anything herself but ably assists in the delivery of the child. The teacher, in changing times, must play the role of such a midwife. The student is to be delivered to society—not carelessly thrown at government or corporate offices for a pizza delivery job. The holistic development of the student as rightly advocated in NEP 20 is the goal worth chasing to make university real, fresh, youthful and magical. It is here that horizontal classroom management, as both an art and a skill, must be adopted and regularly refined. The key lies in unlocking the hidden potential of our youth to bring out the best in them. Let us, for a moment, understand how many of our students are affected by our casual and non-serious approach to classroom management. Pankaj Chandra- former director Indian Institute of Management Bangalore has heard many powerful voices who decry the need for universities and prophesize the vanishing of the teacher.
The American motivational speaker Les Brown remarked: “Most people die at the age of twenty-five and don’t get buried until they are sixty-five.” An American author similarly wrote that the graveyards are the richest places on Earth because “here you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled—books never written, songs never sung, inventions never shared, cures never discovered—because someone was too afraid to take that first step. “The first steps that the author mentions can only be taken in school, college, or university—where the student has the right to be wrong until he gets it right. Former French President Charles de Gaulle once noted: “Cemeteries are full of indispensable men.” Hence the need for levelling the classroom and leveraging the system.
Moving the Centre
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who died recently, was a Kenyan novelist famous for advocating the theory of “moving the center” to make processes and institutions inclusive and just. Following his thesis, we need to move the center in the classroom from the teacher to the student. The role of the teacher is not to be diminished, but the classroom must be democratized. The McKinsey Report (2023) talks about transforming the learning paradigm, which is essential for students in the twenty-first century. It emphasizes that high-performing teachers can raise student performance by 53 percentage points.
Excessive classroom time runs the risk of turning students into passive recipients, affecting the vision of NEP 2020 and producing individuals who are under-socialized and under-educated. Indian students spend more time in the classroom compared to their counterparts in the European Union and the United States, yet they are undereducated. In the EU, students typically take four courses per semester, totaling around 12 hours a week. In India, five courses equate to 20 hours per week, leaving no scope for self-learning.
We have yet to imagine academic life outside the classroom. We need a critical pedagogy—a way of walking alongside students, helping them overcome the dead weight of ready-made facts, definitions, and paradigms. This pedagogy allows students to earn credits from diverse activities such as classroom teaching, laboratory work, Atal Tinkering Labs, minor research projects, tutorials, sports, meditation, social work, farming ,gardening , performing arts, NCC, on-the-job training, and experiential learning. The great Chinese leader Mao-Zedong used to say that: I have studied at the university of green forests”. The 16th president of USA Abraham Lincoln filled out an election form describing his education as “Defective”. The great American General George Patton famously said: “Don’t tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you”.
Keeping students as hostages from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in classrooms promotes only rote learning and has given rise to fast-food education. These institutions have become landscapes of bereavement, producing under socialized youth and dysfunctional adults. The need of the hour and cry from below suggests that Self-learning must be encouraged, and students must be involved as active participants in classroom management. There is merit in learning through association, interaction and conversation. There is an old German saying: “All kinds of little people, doing little acts in little ways in little places, have changed the world.” Let us imbibe it as our new classroom motto.
Prof Gull Wani is Kashmir based Political Scientist and Honorary Senior Fellow Centre for Multilevel Federalism, New Delhi
