Time to have a national exam body: Krishna Kumar
Making an informed career choice is not easy in our overheated system. It has no room for flexibility, says Dr Krishna Kumar.
Dr. Krishna Kumar, professor of education, University of Delhi, and former director of NCERT, speaks about the central issues affecting higher education in India.
Should our education system be reformed so that Class XII students can make informed decisions about their future?
Of course, the examination system needs improvement and change. The reforms initiated after the approval of National Curriculum Framework, 2005, included changes in the pattern of examination. CBSE and some of the State boards introduced certain changes. The outcome of these efforts will take time to manifest. Sustaining this kind of effort is necessary, but it seldom happens. Look at CBSE. It is burdened with a wide variety of entrance and eligibility tests. It was set up to look after secondary education as its name suggests. Now saddled with so much else, how will it find the time and institutional energy to concentrate on secondary education? The 1986 policy had promised a National Examination Organization. The idea was accepted in principle, but never taken forward.
India does need such a body if it wants to avoid Vyapams in future. How much burden can you put on CBSE? Its internal academic strength is very limited. State boards are in far worse condition. Under these circumstances, I am not surprised that examination reforms have lost some of the momentum built up a few years ago.
Has our education system been able to facilitate an environment to arouse student curiosity?
Making an informed choice is not easy in our overheated system. It has no room for flexibility. On the other side, students come with no idea, let alone passion, for an area of study. Many are driven by their parents or peers to make a choice. Arousal of curiosity is the heart of teaching. In our case, the child’s natural curiosity is mutilated during nursery and primary years. Then, in later years of childhood, some teachers try to rekindle it.
As you can imagine, this effort meets with limited success. Secondary schools and colleges usually focus on subject knowledge rather than on the student’s growth. Teachers are under pressure to complete the syllabus, so they overlook the student’s own interest and growth.
Delhi University cut-offs year after year are a letdown for students. Can you offer advice to students at this juncture?
The general advice I can offer to students is to realise that they also contribute to an institution’s reputation. Even bad institutions have good students.
The craze for reputed institutions is a cultural phenomenon. In fact, some of the most reputed institutions are doing very poorly, if you look at them individually. As for the procedure of fixing cut-offs for admission, it is a crude method of selecting students.
It goes against the basic point made by nearly every major commission on education; namely, that the results of school-leaving exam should not be used as a basis for enrollment in college.
Have our universities been able to update their courses so as to reflect changing times?
Our higher education system is facing the consequences of sustained institutional decay. Also, there is a systemic imbalance because the reforms initiated in school education, and its expansion, have not been matched at higher levels of education. It is not merely a question of updating courses or making them more relevant. The quality of any course, its structure and syllabus, depends on how carefully it has been designed and whether its design has taken into account the student’s mind and life. In our case, course designers seldom take into account the student’s life. Even a basic calculation of hours left for self-study is not made. Those who make a syllabus often treat it like a mail box. Everyone throws in a few suggestions, making the course unwieldy and incoherent. The semester system has added to the hurry to complete the syllabus. Traditional exams are not compatible with the semester system, but we have yoked them together. Also, the semester system needs a rich, efficient library system. Our libraries have been allowed to decay.
To what extent will Choice Based Credit System actually ensure a truly interdisciplinary system?
Young people enrolling for undergraduate studies should not act like innocent babies. If they recognize the crisis that the system is facing, their own experience of learning will be enriched. The crisis can give them an opportunity to develop deeper points of engagement with knowledge and society. The so-called choice based credit system is a borrowed innovation. It will exacerbate the crisis. The idea of a centralized curriculum will add to the culture of uniformity that already dominates most State-level universities and colleges. I hardly need to remind your readers that creativity and innovation are incompatible with uniformity and centralization.
How do you assess the quality of social sciences in universities?
Teaching of social sciences and humanities has indeed taken a beating in recent decades. These areas of knowledge provide contemplative capacities and spaces to society. Neglect of social sciences takes a toll on all reflective institutions, including legislative bodies, courts, the media, and universities themselves. Policy-making bodies and major universities ought to have led the struggle to protect the teaching of social sciences, but they did not. Now the larger crisis of higher education has engulfed this area.
I am referring to the crisis caused by hollowing out the faculty strength and cutting down support staff. Governments, both at the Centre and in States, have gone too far in these respects. They have damaged the system much too deeply to leave room for early recovery. They are now talking about filling up vacancies. That is good, but the procedure they have now adopted makes the chances of good selection bleak. UGC has invented academic performance indicators as criteria of selection. This method makes a travesty of academic work. Dr. V. Sujatha of JNU has rightly argued that these scores are inappropriate for the social sciences.
IITs are facing a faculty crunch... Do we need a flexible environment that makes it easy for teachers to join an institution?
When you say that there is a faculty crunch or shortage, you create the impression as if there are no candidates for teaching. This is not true. Institutions have created the present situation by neglecting and postponing appointments for much too long. No one can say for certain how this happened. Institutions got hollowed out. A vast gap now separates the permanent from the contractual faculty.
As for flexibility, of course, private institutions seem to be in a better position to exercise flexibility in certain areas. The public universities are being forced to function under unprecedented conditions. You can hardly make a fair comparison between a handful of private universities and the common reality of public universities. Also, you can’t isolate the question of quality from the larger ethos that an institution provides to its students. The Yash Pal committee on renovation and rejuvenation of higher education has pointed out the scale of our problems. It has also indicated several solutions.
Could you comment on the quality of natural and pure science courses in India?
Teaching of science, and its applications in professional areas like medicine and engineering, occurs within a shell. It does not enable young minds to develop imagination and the passion to hypothesize.
The curriculum and pedagogy of science ought to create what Prof. Yash Pal (who led the complex and vast exercise of formulating the National Curriculum Framework, 2005) called 'a taste for understanding'. Such a taste calls for freedom to work together, across boundaries of different kinds.
Many of our institutions end up presenting science as a procedural ritual. Science blossoms when institutions practice and demonstrate the freedom to think and imagine, and when they engage with the world around them. You can't inculcate a scientific temper in isolation from the world, with its living problems and contradictions.
Take, for instance, the problems of environment. They arise out of contradictions between development goals and technological choices. You need a lot of intellectual freedom to ask the questions that might promise insightful discoveries and connections that we need to make for easing environmental problems.
Far from providing such freedom, we seem to be driven by technological determinism.
