The Knowledge Commission of India has declared that a vast majority of Indian graduates, regardless of their discipline, are unemployable. One of the reasons behind this failure is the absence of soft skills, primary among them is communication, explain Swati Pal and Jitender Gill
We write because we think and we want to pen down those thoughts. It is when we stop thinking, that we stop writing. But why do we stop thinkingIJ Most people blame the internet which makes accessibility to information so very easy, so readymade and so pleasing to the ready-to-eat consumer culture that exists nowadays. Many also point out that technology has been detrimental to people’s reading and speaking skills and certainly we only need to look around to see how rapt people are on their cellphones and how they prefer to fiddle with their gadgets than engage in a conversation. As educationists, we are now resigned to receiving assignments that are proof of the deep rooted sms culture where the language often reads like an extended sms. We suspect that perhaps people hear less these days as inevitably their ears have something plugged on to them!
The question to ask is: is it technology alone that is responsible for our inability to think, which in turn leads to poor writing skillsIJ The answer is a big no. A recent headline of an online article (“Shah Rukh Khan sending her daughter abroad for higher studies”) forcibly brought the deplorable state of Indian education system to mind. Apart from the triviality of the subject, which the headline indicates, this example of bad writing was just another reminder that the education system in the country was not working when professional reporters unashamedly flaunt their ignorance of English language and no one bothers to edit the report before it goes into public domain.
When students enter college, we are often shocked at their inability to even string a single sentence correctly. Poor grammar, incorrect punctuation, spelling errors and inappropriate vocabulary are the instantly recognisable areas of weakness. An analysis of their work reveals their inability to organise their writing cogently which sometimes becomes a meaningless jumble of words and ideas. This is a testimony to the fact that students tend to go overboard cutting and pasting from internet resources. In Delhi University, the semester system has meant that we can no longer iron out the language issues and hone the writing skills of the students. Time constraints do not permit anything more than completion of the ‘syllabus.’ The fault then lies at the grassroots ie, the school education system. And recent ‘innovations’ at the school level such as including testing of listening skills as a part of language learning shows an awareness that obviously something is not quite right with the pattern of learning a language.
So how effective is the kind of classroom learning within schools in the city, in this case the capital city, when it does not develop good writing skills in studentsIJ How are writing skills taughtIJ The first thing to remember of course is that writing cannot be taught in isolation. It has to be taught in conjunction with listening and reading. But what happens in the literature/language classroom is that generally the teacher reads a chapter aloud, or gets students to read it aloud and explains the difficult words and phrases. Thereafter the questions in the exercise or activity following the chapter are discussed and students write the answers down as homework/class work. This is then corrected. A closer look at this mode of pedagogy reveals that students are expected to answer in accordance with what is discussed (read dictated by the teacher) in class and avoid thinking/writing on their own or using vocabulary that is over and above the text. Everything seems geared to a prescriptive code be it the language, the form or the content of writing. Does the student get the liberty to actually mull over what s/he reads or hears in classIJ
A student from a well-known public school in the city narrated how he dared to write about the Industrial Revolution forming the background to the poem The Echoing Green in his home assignment only to incur the wrath of the teacher who gave him the lowest grades in class and told him not to be too pretentious. This, in Class VIII! He rewrote the answers and swore he would stick to what was ‘expected’ but from that day he decided he wouldn’t waste too much effort in what he thought was effective writing. It was the beginning of his disinterest in writing. If this can happen in one of the more privileged institutions of the city, what happens in the State-run schools is anybody’s guess and will need an entirely new article.
This run of the mill teaching and learning process is obviously entrenched in a faulty evaluation system that restricts rather than open up imagination. The shadow of the marking system, especially in the CBSE pattern, looms large over the teachers and rears its ugly head each time the teacher encounters a piece of writing that expresses a perspective in a novel way. A school teacher in the city laments that it’s both the language and the content that she has to often control in ways that she resents. She has to actually warn students whose writing is really interesting in terms of their ideas and views as well as their style of writing because they will not get ‘marks’ if they write in a ‘different’ way. She detests the fact that she is forced to make students adhere to the norms of what constitutes ‘acceptable’ writing, even when she can see how cogently they think and write, when not following the beaten track.
But even within this codified structure of the Indian education system in which the mature, non-prescriptive thinker and writer is the casualty, let’s look at what kind of ‘writing’ is actually taught in schools and how it is taught. Are students taught how to write for academic purposesIJ Is there any academic rigour involved in the teaching of writingIJ Does the teacher take the student through the entire process and conventions of writing an academic answerIJ Does the teacher enable the student to see the difference between creative writing and academic writing or to see the creativity within academic writingIJ A teacher in a Delhi school known for its excellent academic results remarked that it is done very superficially. Students are taught theoretically about the writing process involving reading, note taking, summarising, paraphrasing, critical thinking and structuring an argument. In fact, note taking, summarising and paraphrasing form separate units for the language (grammar and composition) section of say, English, as a discipline.
This teacher feels that there is not enough synthesis of what is taught under the rubric of ‘language’ with the way writing, in particular academic writing, should always be, regardless of the discipline. Being ‘informed’ about the process involved and actually engaging with the process while writing, ie, the gap between the theory and the praxis of writing is not bridged at the school level. This is evident when the student enters college, as teachers across colleges, be they the ones that get the high scoring students or the ones that don’t, unanimously acknowledge that ‘the students just can’t write’. So what happens next in collegeIJ Do writing skills improveIJ
Every year, when the admission process begins, the seemingly impossible eligibility criteria of some colleges of Delhi University are reported with great flourish by the media, while parents boast of their wards’ stellar performance in this academic marathon. But those who teach these students at college level know well that these marks do not bear the slightest relationship to the intellectual credentials of the students. Students with eighty and ninety per cent marks in English, for instance, consistently write the kind of English that is completely lacking in even a vestigial knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. This is equally applicable to Hindi, Economics, Maths, etc. The future improvement, if any, in the student’s level of academic accomplishments depends entirely on the receptivity of the student and the professional integrity of the teacher. Acquisition of education cannot be dependent on factors like this, there must be some consistency and uniformity in the quality of education a student gets.
Every time statements about creating ‘world class’ universities in India are made, it makes the present system’s inadequacy in fulfilling the educational needs of the country glaringly obvious. Before this miracle can be performed, we need a vision that has a clear goal and aims. Mouthing fancy words at high-powered conferences on education; uncritically copying academic models from other countries; or just pandering to the vested interests, that is how the contemporary educational ‘reforms’ can be defined. Starting from curriculum revision, a complete overhaul of the evaluation system, modes of pedagogy, and most of all, a general enhancement in the quality of the education provided; in fact, the way education is perceived in India, needs to be reworked.
We need to understand that the term education covers a wide territory. Focussing just on professional or technical courses is not the solution to the crisis we are facing. In the current global scenario, humanities, pure sciences and management courses, all need inputs from each other. The synergy between various disciplines needs to be encouraged simultaneously, so that they can benefit each other. Even a management graduate or an engineer needs to make presentations in which writing skills are required, very often it is precisely this skill that is missing. The Knowledge Commission of India has declared that a vast majority of Indian graduates, regardless of their discipline, are unemployable. One of the reasons behind this failure is the absence of soft skills, primary among them is communication.
But in India, there has been a consistent systemic bias against liberal Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, which actually lay significant stress on writing and expression, that begins to manifest itself at higher secondary level. There are schools which do not offer these subjects at higher secondary level because Humanities subjects are commonly believed to be ‘less scoring’. Consequently, students likely to get lesser marks in Class XII exams are encouraged to take up vocational subjects, which, because of their practical component, can result in higher marks. All this is done regardless of the future plans of the students or whether they want to study these subjects or not. The refusal of such schools to let students study Humanities/Social Sciences has been allowed to continue because many parents too look down upon Humanities.
At the time of admission to college, the unfairness of this arbitrarily created hierarchy in subjects becomes glaringly obvious. Students who have studied Sciences in school are eligible to apply for Science, Commerce and Humanities courses; Commerce students can apply for Commerce courses in addition to Humanities; but students who have studied Humanities/Social Sciences in school are deemed eligible for admission only to Humanities courses. The irony is that in order to get admission to their preferred courses in college, these students have to compete with non-Humanities students with higher percentage, who are taking admission in Humanities only because they are not eligible for admission to their chosen course.
Even students of vocational streams get admission in Humanities courses in colleges because of their higher percentage at the expense of Humanities students who, in spite of choosing these subjects in school, find themselves at a disadvantage to other students who have neither the aptitude nor desire to study these subjects. This is, to some extent, responsible for the poor quality of students in many Humanities/Social Science subjects at college level.
It comes as no surprise to English teachers when they find the article conspicuous by its absence in the answers of the students. It seems that the obituary of the apostrophe ‘s’ has already been written, while the usage of pronouns suffers from excessive interference of the first language. Punctuation, prepositions and conjunction are totally unknown to this generation of tech-savvy writers. One comes across four-five page long papers written by students which have no paragraph divisions. The idea of writing an introduction and conclusion or even a well thought out draft seems foreign. What we are likely to get as answers are boring, meaningless and repetitive summaries of whatever they have read. No attempt is made to actually analyse, interpret or critique the given text.
Given the fact that in college, the students are expected to have already mastered the craft of writing, there are few avenues available to actually iron out these wrinkles without the active participation of students. The tragic irony of the situation is that it is precisely these half-baked writers/students who proceed to teach the next generation of students after graduating from college. Thus, the GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) syndrome perpetuates itself in an endless cycle of futility.
Another reason behind the deteriorating quality of students in subjects like English literature is that in the past decade or so, there are hardly any schools affiliated to CBSE which offer English literature as an option, whereas ICSE has a compulsory component of literature at Class X as well XI and XII level. It is not surprising, therefore, that the spoken and written English skills of students affiliated to ICSE are conspicuously better than CBSE.
Experimenting with language teaching and learning is also certainly not the way to bring about educational reform. Time and again, language politics have dictated how many languages a child learns at schools and which these should be, often ignoring the ground reality.
The fact of the matter is that children between the ages of six to 14 have a greater ability to pick up languages and they should be given the freedom to choose languages they feel will help them later, perhaps at an international arena. It has been repeatedly proved, for example, that students who are not exposed to English find it difficult to compete in exams requiring some skill in the same; hence a lot of States have revoked the prioritising of the vernacular languages over and above English.
When most countries are focussing on becoming knowledge economies, India continues to be in denial about the urgency of transforming its education system from primary to tertiary levels.
Smaller countries like Singapore and Malaysia, that have not been traditionally perceived as centres of excellence for education, have self-consciously and diligently reinvented themselves as attractive options for students requiring quality education without the prohibitive costs of European, American, Australian universities.
India is not just missing out on this opportunity, but is actually ignoring the needs of its own burgeoning student population, which is increasingly choosing these educational destinations due to paucity of good institutions of higher learning within the country.
The views expressed by the authors are their own. They teach at Janki Devi Memorial College, DU. Apart from their interest in literature, Swati and Jitender have written and spoken extensively on academic writing/creative pedagogy and on the educational system/reforms, respectively
