Is the CM being
misled?
Statistics being used to
colour the truth in HSTP
The
Government of Madhya Pradesh shut down the Hoshangabad Science Teaching
Programme (HSTP) in Hoshangabad and not a single person in the district
protested against the decision. On the contrary, the people of Hoshangabad
welcomed the decision. This is what Chief Minister Digvijay Singh said on
Thursday, August 1, 2002, while officially responding to intellectuals who had
written to him voicing their concern and protest against the state government’s
sudden move.
The
truth is slightly different. There was a spontaneous reaction against the
closure move among teachers, parents, students and concerned citizens in the
district, with both teachers and parents voicing their intention to take out a
delegation to Bhopal to meet the chief minister to register their protest. A
signature campaign elicited a couple of thousand signatures within days and when
these signed petitions were presented to the Collector of Hoshangabad, his
response was, “Why are they politicising the whole issue? Where is the provision
for referendum?” Pray, who is politicising the issue?
However,
the government says it is the democratic right of people to register their
protest. That is why it had responded to the genuine demand of the District
Planning Committee which called for a closure of the programme because it did
not want a different set of textbooks and a different methodology of teaching
science for children in the district. But here, too, a slight discrepancy
exists. Nine of the 12 members of the DPC called for a review of the decision in
writing on the ground that they felt the decision was hasty and ill considered.
The unanimous demand for closure was moved by a single non-voting member and
rushed through without adequate debate and without circulating the agenda note
prepared by the education department, according to statements given subsequently
by the dissenting members.
In
the second meeting of the DPC held on May 9, 2002, which nobody seems to even
refer to, there was a heated debate on the issue, with both sides presenting
their arguments. It ended in a virtual stalemate, with DPC members split on the
issue, and the consensus decision was to leave the final decision on closing the
programme to the chief minister.
The
chief minister stated that the Department of School Education examined the issue
and found that parents were genuinely anxious about the problem of their
children migrating from this alternative methodology in Class 6 to Class 8 to
the higher classes. The government says it rejected Eklavya’s contention that
HSTP could not be measured by the common evaluation system that all students,
including HSTP students, are meant to take. It, therefore, measured the
performance of both HSTP and non-HSTP children in the first common evaluation
examination they took - the Class 10 Board Examination.
This
is, again, a travesty of the truth. Eklavya has not said that a common
evaluation should not be done to test the merits of the programme and the
competencies achieved by HSTP students, as compared to students studying
mainstream science. In fact, it continues to urge the government to do just
that. What it finds unacceptable is the use of an evaluation system that tests
for memory recall and rote learning - and this is a universally accepted
criticism of the education and evaluation system in the country, not a pet peeve
of Eklavya - to test for competencies like analytical ability, experimental and
observational skills, the ability to derive conclusions from a given set of data
etc. These are competencies that children require to learn to learn, not a mass
of data that, in a field like information technology, could become redundant in
a couple of years.
Also,
Eklavya has conducted its independent studies about the learning difficulties of
children when they migrate from the HSTP methodology to the rote learning system
in higher classes. It found that HSTP children were able to cope competently to
the change. We found that the complaint about difficulties in science in Class 9
is a universal complaint even in mainstream curriculum, not just in HSTP,
because there is a suddent jump in the complexity of concepts
taught.
However,
what is most distressing are the statistics quoted by the chief minister
regarding the performance in the Class 10 examination. It states that the
failure rate in science in 2001-2002 is 26 percent, while it is 30 percent in
Hoshangabad district. Again the truth is not what the statement makes it out to
be. We obtained the districtwise statistics of the Board examination from the
Madhyamik Shiksha Mandal last month and found that of the 520,483 students whose
science results were declared in the state, 283,416 had passed. That puts the
pass percentage at 54.5 percent and the failure rate at 45.5 percent. Of the
14,760 students whose science results were declared in the two HSTP districts,
Hoshangabad and Harda, 8551 students passed. The combined pass percentage was
57.9 percent (Hoshangabad 55.6 percent and Harda 68.1 percent) and the failure
rate 42.1 percent - 3.4 percentage points below the state average.
If
this is the truth about the two statistics quoted against HSTP, what lies behind
the other statistics that have been consistently quoted in public forums? We
reserve further comment.
The
chief minister says that the government was not in favour of having different
sets of textbooks for different districts, hence it closed down HSTP in
Hoshangabad. Here again, this is only a partial truth. The government has not
closed down HSTP in Harda district or in the school complexes in 13 other
districts where the programme has been seeded. That is the clarification given
by the State Education Department in response to a query from Eklavya following
the confusion that ensued after the release of the original closure order which
specifically states that HSTP has been closed in Hoshangabad district. Is the
government waiting for the democratic demand of people of these districts to
demand closure before making a move?
The
chief minister says that HSTP can no longer be called an experimental programme
since it has been in operation for 30 years. Eklavya fully agrees with this
view. It is not an experimental programme. It is a proven alternative which
works in the field at a macro scale. It proves that it is possible to teach
science through experiment, as recommended by all educational policy documents
from even before independence, in ordinary government schools. Eklavya wants the
programme to be expanded to the state, since it has been a successful programme.
This is also the view of NCERT, which evaluated the programme in 1991 and
recommended its expansion. It is the state government that has put the decision
on the backburner all these years.
Finally,
the state government says it would like to draw the best practices from all
educational initiatives, including HSTP, to improve the state textbooks. Eklavya
would also like to improve the state textbooks, But there is a saying that you
cannot compare chalk and cheese. Existing textbooks are structured for rote
learning. Eklavya textbooks are structured for learning through experiments. So
unless this universally accepted methodology is the base for a textbook, any
marriage of the two would only be a marriage of convenience and expediency, not
fundamental change. Eklavya again reiterates its willingness to work in
collaboration with the government to affect this fundamental
change.
Rex
D’Rozario
For
the Eklavya Group
Encl: 1. Eklavya’s letter to
the Hoshangabad collector regarding the signature
campaign,
with the collector's notation.
2. MP Board of Secondary Education, Bhopal, High School Certificate
Examination 2002
statistics.