In their comments
to yesterday's post, Ali and Mohit preempted what I was going to write about
today.
Ali said...
...While the intention may have been to assign
the teachers who were better at teaching more advanced stuff, I think it was
seen as assigning the best teachers. That never goes down well...
Mohit said...
…The system of segregating the
"smart" ones out is something the students and parents find unfair…
I would like to echo their
thoughts. In an attempt to be seen as fair to the not-so-ambitious, the system
started to assign students randomly across the different divisions or classes. I suspect this approach
has engendered a strange problem across the last couple of decades.
I need to state here that I am not against this approach at the policy level. I appreciate that there is definite merit to having a classroom with diverse skills and qualities.
My issue is with simplistic
approaches to implementation of policy. When we studied Organization Behaviour
at B-School, one of the sessions focused on how a team of high performers
becomes synergistic, making the overall team performance better than the sum of
its parts. I can easily imagine a small class of curious, enthusiastic and
driven students working on building a prototype of something at an engineering
college feeding off each other’s ideas. I can just as easily imagine a group
with one enthusiastic person who finds his or her batteries getting drained by the
apathy of the other members in the group.
We need to think long and hard about whether we are being unfair to the Einsteins in the country and dooming them to drudgery. How do we nurture the talent of tomorrow? Who will focus on enabling the best to become even better?
3 comments:
I suspect that the nurturing of such high quality talent can even happen in an environment with less funding, but more proactivity. If I was a cash strapped policy maker for, say, schools in Bombay, I'd ensure that I talk to groups in IIT, IDC and so on, to take ten kids selected by schools and include them in their activities.
CTARA at IIT Bombay, for instance, was working on this superb problem of laying down a metered water distribution system for a village in Karjat. Apart from the technical issues, there were a host of logistical complications which made for a brilliant, multi-faceted problem.
Tinkerers Lab, at IIT Bombay again, is another excellent place where people from all age groups sit together and build electronics' projects that they want to build - either for competitions, or home projects, or hobby ideas.
Point being - these things do not take much in terms of policy money and are things that can very well exist without government policy support.
As a school principal, I want to select my best students and not subject them to a linear, failure-proof, teacher driven education. I want to put them out there in application areas where they appreciate how the best kind of education is stop-start, failure-driven and full of discovery. All of this in a setup where people far smarter and wiser than them are solving those problems in elegant ways. And of course, all of this in an environment of respect and humbleness.
For the most curious and overactive minds out there, any kind of a mass system would be:
A) Drudgery
B) Crowded out by non serious competition (The IITs are a great example of non-driven engineering students crowding out the people who would value such an opportunity)
Hi Shiv,
Apologise upfront for this rather long post.
First things first : Being 'not-so-gifted'..in other words..normal, is not quite the same as 'affirmative action'. Two completely different things that, as I am sure you already know, but this blog seems to confuse. Affluent/Privilaged does not equal gifted and marginalised does not mean 'not gifted'.
Second, maybe 'segregation' as you call it went out of fashion, not to seem 'equitable to the not-so-gifted' but because that whole premise was somehow flawed ? Giftedness, as measured in the classroom, is usually just a measure of IQ. (Maybe a little different today, but certainly in the era you speak about, it surely was) As has now been proven over and over again, there is no straight correlation between IQ and 'Success'. Several other things, broadly packaged for simplicity as 'EQ' have been seen to be more defining. See around yourself, the most successful people are not necessarily those with the best academic track records (or the highest IQs), and vice versa. Also, giftedness exists along multiple dimensions : Lata Mangeshkar or Sachin Tendulkar may never have made the cut in that old 'segregation' approach. In fact, I would argue that the damage to their self esteem by being classified as secondary citizens would have been so great, they may have never shone in anything at all.
This is not to say that giftedness does not need nurturing. For example, in the US and Canada, the public school system offers a gifted program for kids that do well academically. Run like an 'ECA', it offers additional challenge to gifted kids, while ensuring they develop social and emotional skills by continuing to be part of a larger 'normal' group- building friendships, relationsips with all types of kids. There is much merit in this system. In India, there is no public school system to speak of, so individual schools do this in their own ways. Parents play a much bigger role as well.Which is fine as well.
Shweta
P.S. The title- is it provocative on purpose ? Surely you dont mean that 'Not gifted' equals mediocre ?
Hello Shweta,
I appreciate that there are multiple dimensions to intelligence. Nowhere in the post have I mentioned Math ability or IQ as the discriminant. I am more concerned with the lack of focus on students who are driven to succeed. Sachin Tendulkar used to put in more than 8 hours of practice a day. I am sure Lata Mangeshkar put in more. They were also lucky to have coaches or mentors that nurtured their gift.
Thank you for pointing out the error on affirmative action. Have edited the blog-post to make the correction
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