http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/aakarvani/rote-on-a-roll-why-spelling-wizards-are-indias-gift-to-the-world/
Rote on a roll: Why spelling wizards are India's gift to the world May 24, 2015, 11:11 AM IST Aakar Patel in Aakarvani | India, World | TOI ***Few things expose the problems of India's education system as do our triumphs in America. Further evidence of this came on May 14, when The Times of India reported that a 14-year-old Indian-American had won the National Geographic Bee, which is a quiz. The winner competed with 10 other finalists of whom seven were of Indian origin.*** [Emphasis added.] This success is echoed in another American national competition, the Scripps Spelling Bee. Ten of the last 12 of these spelling contests have been won by Indians. ***Do Indian children possess some incandescent genius? Are parents passing on a brainiac gene? No, because this total and crushing dominance is not replicated in other aspects of learning, such as a talent for invention.*** [Emphasis added.] My explanation for the success is that these contests play to our strength, which is learning by rote. Indian parents who have been trained in this fashion take the culture with them to America, where the kids shine in an area other cultures are not interested in. All Indian languages have a word for such learning by rote. In Hindi it is ratta and in Gujarati it is gokh. Those of us who did well at school will have memories of doing this. My personal style being to circle the terrace chanting paragraph after paragraph of text, whether science or history, in rhythm till I had committed the thing to memory. National Geographic 2015 Geography Bee Final The exercise began at the most a week before the exam and little or nothing of value was retained once it had been vomited out on the paper. In the language of computers, I believe it would be called Random Access Memory, or RAM, the stuff that is erased almost immediately. I bring this up because one of the things I like about this government is its focus on skills in education. Admittedly, this is not recent and a paper from the previous government also stresses it. The 2009 overview on 'National Skill Development Initiative in India' said that the target group was the 1.25 crore people, 15 years old and above, who entered the labour market each year. Current capacity of skill development programmes was about 30 lakh, meaning the majority got no training before being employed. This led to wastage in terms of time and losses of capacity and earning. The government recognises this as a problem and the Prime Minister is serious enough about the project to have personally coined a name for it: Skill India. The paper quoted above spoke of "a target of skilling 500 million people by 2022" and added that "as the proportion of working age group of 15-59 years will be increasing steadily, India has the advantage of demographic dividend." Do we? The non-profit organization Population Reference Bureau says demographic dividend is "particularly misunderstood by leaders and decision makers in developing countries who, based on their large youth populations, are optimistic about the prospects for such a dividend." Its true advantages came not only through large working age populations but a decline in fertility and, this being important, a priority on education. But of what sort? The government paper says "harnessing the demographic dividend through appropriate skill development efforts would provide an opportunity to achieve inclusion and productivity within the country and also a reduction in the global skill shortages. Large-scale skill development is thus an imminent imperative." My point is that the thrust of all of this is purely on the vocational side. It looks to training the working adult and while this is important it does not address an important problem, which is a wrong focus in basic education. Our children need better cognitive skills, experience of working with their hands, doing basic science armed with simple tools, and making things and figuring out how they work. All of this over our Brahminical system of learning, which is what passes for education in India. There is too little, and often nothing, of the sort of education that requires physical interaction with the world. Retention and memorisation are rewarded and encouraged, not just by the school, but by the family. This explains the disproportionate enthusiasm Indian-Americans have for those contests. Not all memorising is bad and I accept that. The reason the Vedas have survived from a time when Indians had no script is because they have been memorised by Brahmins in a particular cadence, chanted through the millennia and even today some traditionalists will trust the chant rather than the text. But its value in the modern world is limited. Vocational training such as carpentry and plumbing and machining becomes easier if children already have experience of how to work with their hands, a skill more important than knowing the capital of Burkina Faso and the correct spelling of stichomythia. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
