Revisiting educational teaching

Of late, I came across a document from the JKPSC delineating the prerequisites for taking the Civil Services Examination. Among other things, the standard of the paper, as highlighted, amounts to that of a bachelor’s degree. The optional paper stands at the level of the honors degree. With such assertions proposed, a question pops up: why can’t a PG student get through the test easily?

In the grand scheme of explanations, one possible concrete reason that explains the inability of a student to pass the test includes “unhelpful ways to impart education from the first day of the student’s educational voyage.” What sets the tone for becoming poorly educated at the competitive stage includes an intense urge to demand “tip-of-the-tongue memorization” from a student during their early educational journey. A teacher pressurizes a student to mug up the contents of books and regurgitate them onto the examination paper, little ensuring if the books are truly understood or not.

The result of such short memorization techniques to vanquish the question-marked gaze of papers results in weakening our ability to expand our comprehension skills and understanding of a topic. We become robots, acting out something as we receive it. Hence, we succeed at implanting the seed of intellectual sickness, believing days should pass; the road ahead will be seen: a blunder that sticks its ugly head out in times of failing at competitive tests.

Another grave issue eating away at the creativity of our students remains the worrying haste about the completion of the syllabi in time. This is what we witnessed during our college days, and this is what I witnessed during my university days. Instead of digging into a topic and covering its ins and outs, we leave it for some divine, nonexistent time to absorb it, and we move on to the next topic. Leaving a previous topic half-touched and rushing to a new topic afresh means setting a precedent for half-absorption of external stimuli. Syllabi, which should have taken six months to complete, get read in three months. Such rage and rush cost a lot to a student now preparing for exams that ask questions roughly similar to “What does a black cat do in a pitch-black room?”

Leave these two intellectually corroding sides of our educational domain aside; what we further lack are efficient tools to spark a student’s interest in a topic. Attention is not given to how to spark students’ curiosity with catchphrases, anecdotes, and questions at the start of a lecture; rather, what we do is shoot lectures at receptive-or-not-receptive students. There’s no discussion on analyzing students’ likeness in classes, in topics, or in forging promising prospects for a career – something distressing that we can’t afford to have amid the chronic depressive tendencies of students failing at every genuine test. Tests that are as vast as the sea: fishes and all. Not rivulets that we learned to half-navigate the surface of during our learning days.

What scratches the scars hard is the excessive formality with regards to our educational institutes: time-bound filling up of forms, nicely pronounced salutations, 24-carat putting on of the uniform, and so forth. A slight deviance from the stone-carved regulations and you are disgraced. Being strict with rules and overlooking the main theme of the whole entity just doesn’t add up.

Such hypocritical situations compel one to question the philosophical conundrum as to whether this life is meaningful or not! These annoying paradoxes, coupled with pedagogical weaknesses, channel a student's subconscious in a direction, leading them to wonder, “How difficult are the questions asked in competitive examinations?”

It’s something to consider and resolve, not overlook and never look into.

Tailpiece:

I am afraid students might one day wonder what the teachers themselves teach and ask in the question paper framed by them. God!