31.7.2002
Shri Digvijay Singh ji,
I thank for your letter of 27 July. I can understand some of the pressures on you. Yet, it is difficult for me to accept your decision without sadness and disappointment. Let me try to explain the reason for these feelings.
- What you call the mainstream system of education is precisely what one set out to change a little over 30 years ago. Little children loaded with books and deprived of comprehension and joy of learning is a state that should not continue. This was and largely is a system where education is believed to be a commodity to be delivered to children. A lot is supposedly learnt and little is absorbed and made fertile. The examinations, including the CBSE and the STATE Boards, are largely concentrating on the storage capacity of minds for information, dead or alive. They distinguish between children who have scored 97 % marks from those who get 98% or 96%! There is a madness on the part of parents, students and teachers to 'train' children like race horses to get that last one or two percent This pleases the enormously lucrative industry of tuitions and coaching in which a large fraction of the teachers from schools are also involved. It is not unusual for well-to-do parents to spend almost I lakh on the tuition of a child in some metropolitan cities. All this is socially discriminating to a high degree. Students are under high pressure, to an extent that the joy of acquiring knowledge is often extinguished. The stress levels reach a point where children suffer from cortexial eliminations.
- Little children are usually much sharper that the grown up individuals in observation and wonder. Most of us have grown through a process of learning in which this faculty is curbed, because the syllabus and the examinations have no place for it. After a while even the child's brain shuts down the processing circuits that have not been used for a long time. Scientific temper, wondering and dreaming become useless "out of course" activities. Learning ends up being less fertile than it otherwise might have been. The trouble is that in our exams we do not distinguish between fertile knowledge and barren information.
- I, along with many friends, had hoped that the Hoshangabad program was proceeding in a direction where we might begin addressing this problem. I do not want to go into the history of how we came to be that way. I have to confess that my hope was to work in an area where a degree of freedom is available. The intention was not prepare athletes competing for gold medals in the mindless hurdle race of the board examinations. Therefore the fact that the children coming out of the program have been able to cope with what is done later, without coming at the end or coming up front is quite satisfying. To me the most important component of evaluation is the number of questions children ask in the class and how free they feel. Such a process evaluation would tell us whether we have been proceeding in the right direction.
- Education does not comprise only of textbooks that are read to the class by teachers. That is the least important component. Education is a transaction between the teacher and the student and building on the unexpected entanglements with the environment and the unpredictable mind of the young. Education has to be contextualised to make the knowledge one's own. This is the element that the HSTP tried to introduce. By all means evaluate whether there has been any measurable success in this area and compare it with other environments of education.
- Whichever state I have visited people have told me of what they have learnt from this effort Not just independent teachers and educators but also many young people working in various SCERTs. Besides this there are the gifted people in many universities, IITs and research laboratories who have contributed much effort and energy to this program. I came back from Bombay yesterday. I was surrounded by such people from TIFR, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, the HT, and the Bombay University, showing concern about what might happen.
- Having said all this I do not suggest that no change or changed way of working should be thought of. I have a feeling that your mind has also worked in that direction. Unfortunately some of the comments from an administrative committee have been rather wooden. I have not discussed it in detail with any one, but I can envisage that the State Council for Education and Research could work closely with Eklavya and ultimately take over much of the responsibility for training without changing the basic principles which are essentially sound. If some sort of stay could be granted and a process of exploration of a varied and alternative method of cooperation could be explored it would be all to the good of education in the State, - not only the State but also the rest of India. I would like to see the work of Eklavya as a beginning to help transform the whole of our education. Believe me it is required. You have a State Advisory Committee on Education and should you want me to get involved in any way I would be happy to do whatever I can.
With warm personal regards,
Yours sincerely,
Yash Pal
Shri Digvijay Singh
Chief Minister
Government of Madhya Pradesh
Bhopal-452 004