About why I write on Education

On a quick glance through the posts I’ve made over the last year or so – a glaring theme emerges. Almost all of my latest posts are on “Education” – one way or the other. How loser can a blogger be to have “Education” as one of his categories? Well, ask me. My previous post, which was three months ago during my first break from XL rigour spoke about method in academics, then there is a entry on the menacingly vocational nature of education, and this post on the proof of concept was conceived during one of my numerous disillusioned run-ins with education.

Education as a topic is worse than a lullaby, more potent than pills. To write about education is as dull as Rahul Dravid’s ODI batting strike rate in the mid/late nineties. But with Dravid’s renewed eloquence in 2011, education can take heart. There is hope, still! Random thoughts of a confused/convoluted/demented mind make for good blog posts, you then graduate to love sagas, abstruse lines of poetry, armchair commentary on sport and so on. All make for good reads. Yet, I ended up sticking to prose on education. There is a reason to it.

My father is a education consultant/educator/tutor. And education in the 1990s was orthodox to a great extent. All throughout my schooling, there was tremendous focus on paper and pen education. About solving, erasing, drawing lines, resolving, rewriting, better presentation, practicing, reading text. You get the drift, don’t you? And tuition was encouraged. I must have spent half my life sitting in institution/classes/tuition. School classes, math classes, science classes, competitive exams, Bombay Talent Searches, National Talent Searches, language sessions, lab sessions, Sanskrit classes, computer science courses, C++, Java to list down a few. The best bit is that I was never too enthusiastic about any of them. I am pretty convinced that if I had spent half the hours I have spent in tuition in my life, in practicing (say) water polo or fencing, I would have made the fringes of the Indian national squad, for sure!

Kids in Mumbai waste a quarter of their childhood travelling to tuition. In sweltering heat, with sweat under their armpits and fifty rupees in pocket, most kids travel on about an hour to reach their college/tuition. I used to travel 2 hours a day (1 hour each way) bearing the full brunt of local trains just to “reach” my junior college. And, let me assure you that it is a very difficult task to motivate yourself to pay attention in class/tuition after one hour of ruthless travel. Like most others in my city, I have sat through hours and hours and hours of tuition, listless and confused – most importantly physically and mentally tired. Add t0 that the randomness of engineering in Mumbai where I was sitting in class six hours a day, travelling for another two hours per day with just 40 days of proper holiday per year, and what you get is more education and some more. Add to that the tuition I took for ghastly horrors like engineering drawing and you have some more education. Then education for MBA entrance exams. And then MBA itself.

All throughout my childhood, I was told that tuition was essential for academic and professional development and thattuition was academia itself. (By tuition, I mean the act of an educator/coach delivering concepts/knowledge/gyaan in classroom environment to students). And hence I held all classrooms in very high regard, as if it was my moral duty to absorb all “tuition” that was being delivered. Naive and young, I had no reason to believe that tuition was a farce. As time passed, and I developed some ounce of critical thinking, it slowly crept to me that tuition was not as sacrosanct as it was made out to be. I started finding faults in tuition methodologies. At times, it became very glaring that the educator was simply not putting enough effort into delivering tuition, and here I was on the other end, writhing in frustration because someone else was not doing his job (for what he was being paid for) perfectly. Sometime in the middle of my engineering curriculum, I suffered a total breakdown in faith. I came to the conclusion that, as a student I could do no more. I was trying my level best to be a attentive student, but thetuition and methodologies were failing me over and over again. I sensed no improvement. And from then onwards, a huge part of me resigned to the fact that I would have to make up for this inefficiency in tuition by working on my own, behind closed doors, not only trying to consolidate my understanding, but also make up for the fallacies in tuition and its methods.

According to me, the gaps in a course emerge out of the following themes:

1. Interest: Lack of awareness and understanding of why one is taking the course.

2. Planning: Lack of a solid course structure which would have otherwise allowed the students to plan their way across its duration.

3. Communication: Educators not working on their communication are like batsmen refusing to work on their fielding. Unfortunately, there is no place for either in the modern world.

4. Ambiguity: Some educators, even at this day and age, prefer to thrive on ambiguity and information asymmetry. I thought that these themes vanished back in the 19th century.

5. Relevance: What is taught in class vs what appears in exams vs what is required/relevant in the real world.

6. Trepidation: A feeling of constant fear that if I don’t lick your boots, I will fail in the course.

7. Mindset: Educators need to move from a Theory X mindset to a Theory Y mindset. Students want to learn. And if you can put in honest, quality effort; they will reciprocate with honest, quality work. But it is not easy to put in honest effort being an educator perhaps. Because it entails generating interest, structuring the course, mesmerizing the students with classy communication, reducing ambiguity to zero, bringing in relevance and not abstraction and alleviating any fear in the minds of the students. Clearly, an uphill ask.

In my honest (and worthless) opinion, good schools are those which work systematically towards eliminating all these gaps which agitate student lives. I don’t know what schools these are, and where you find them, but an ideal institution needs to have a publicly available mandate describing its measures/efforts made to tackle and eliminate the above gaps. There are other minor themes to talk about as well, but that would drag this post on forever, so i’ll cease to flirt with them.

In the middle of all the chaos, I ended up securing a University Rank and some obscene scores in my engineering degree. How and more importantly why, I do not know. But a lot of it has to be attributed to this web I had gotten myself into. I would put a lot of effort into every course, not because I wanted to excel badly at it, but because I felt that the tuition and its methods were inadequate and insufficient. I have spent hours and hours inside my study room, contemplating on “How should this have been taught?” , “Say if I were to teach this, how could I do this better?” and thus wasted a whole lot of productive time reworking and reinventing the wheel, to cover up for the foibles of poor tuition. All this in the hope that somewhere down the line the educators would perhaps work a bit harder to deliver quality content, and somewhere down the line I could just go back to my room, put my feet up and relax, knowing that the content had been ably delivered in the classrooms.

When I look back at it, I do not feel bad about the grind as much. On the positive side, it helped me make a lot of friends – for almost always I was the one explaining, elucidating concepts before exams. But it has cost me a fortune. For the last three to four years, I have sacrificed all my interests and desires, for getting entangled in this web, I have never really managed to find time to indulge myself in things that I want to do. I have not attended/enjoyed/pursued as many quizzes as I would have wanted to, never found the peace to prepare for prestigious quiz events. I have given up on cricket totally, and almost all other sports other than football. There have been numerous occasions where I wanted to begin something entrepreneurial, which of course I had to shelve. Regurgitating classroom concepts meant lesser movies, lesser parties, lesser sporting events, lesser life. Compensating for the lack of proper tuition has made me unhappy, unhealthy and grumpy beyond repair. It should not surprise you when I tell you that I’ve not had a proper holiday/vacation/sojourn for four years now. For, I have spent all my vacations doing mundane activities which I wanted to but could not pursue because of the ambiguity, irrelevance and futility of tuition and courses.

But very recently, I have made peace with the fact that the education and tuition is never going to improve drastically. And it is an individual choice that one has to make whether to bother oneself with the clumsy and regressive methods of tuition or just let this phase go, expecting no real value out of the whole deal. What good has come out of this million hours of fruitless labour, is that I now have (very?) sound perspectives about tuition – methods, frameworks, responsibilities of the educators and students, planning, delivery, execution and grades/rewards.  Sometimes, I desperately want to don the hat of an educator for I genuinely feel that I could structure/deliver courses gazillion times better than they are done today. And then I write posts on education, hoping against hope, that someone in the wind would catch the sentiment and tuition would improve in the coming periods. I am a wiser man now. People talk about market research, prospecting to find undervalued stocks, emerging themes and what not –  education for me is the theme of the next decade. There is so much to do in education (as with insurance, bond markets, infrastructure, healthcare and microfinance) that somewhere down the line these ideas about tuition would no doubt bear some fruit. With international schools (as are health/wellness centres) mushrooming all over the country, education presents itself as a lucrative/meaningful opportunity. With added competition, institutions would have to shoulder more responsibility, reinvent themselves, work on their tuition and academic structures in order to survive. And I hope that the generation ahead, will have a better sense of tuition and education than what I was fed. The education theme is so strong that Mckinsey and BCG have set up their own education practices in this country in recent years. There is enough work for everyone!

Given this rather verbose disclosure, my intensity of posts on education will wane. You shall be taken out of your misery, not to worry. But not before I have made you read this another post under the category “Education”. Ha! 1-up on you!

There is a sense of betrayal. I have given up far too much in search of education/tuition and have returned empty handed far too often. Perhaps, it is because my ideas are flawed. Or my decisions. I don’t know. But now, as I see things, it is futile to give up life for the cause of education. There are better causes, more pressing needs (both personal and societal)  in this world to channel your attention onto.

Tagged as:  Education