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In village, children are characterised mainly by their
playfulness. In order to become a bada admi, schooling
demands that they must give up ‘playing’ to learn to become
a model student who lives up to the demands of his teacher. The
failure is a stigma in school and a symbol of inability of the
very fundamental kind. The failure in a class is equated with
social backwardness, financial dependence upon others and no
chance of becoming a respectable man in life.
School knowledge
is a storehouse of propositions from society, which is necessary
for the child to know, and is put in the textbooks. A student
may ‘know’ a formulae, theory or equation, but does he
understand it? The children learn that they could be heard if
they ‘spoke from knowledge or authority.’
According to the
study, a textbook culture existed in the classroom. The teacher
was the primary actor who decided what was to be done or not
done as far as the teaching-learning process was concerned. So
the classroom centred around the authoritarian teachers.
Teaching the new lessons meant to know the ‘right answers.’
The students had to match the textbook answers, both for the
content and language. The teacher never explored what the
students were thinking, as they were not expected to participate
in the teaching-learning process. The students expected even the
‘right questions’ and anything not in the textbook was not
considered knowledge.
The regulation of
knowledge is through the process of teaching and learning.
Teachers in school, in which the study was carried out, used the
‘teachering device.’ It included pedagogic communication,
the use of voice to give impression that sacrosanct important
announcements were being made with authority and the students
had no choice but to repeat these till they memorised them. The
teachers used the other device of ‘teachering,’ the eyes,
which ensured that children did not veer from the duty of
memorising.
The students tend
to adopt different ways of finding out and verifying knowledge
Asking to know from others is an important activity, as they
know whom to ask for what kind of knowledge. The person who can
answer their questions has to be elder to them and the first
expert/authority is the teacher. Remembering or yaad karna
turned out to be the most important activity of the student,
through which they acquired knowledge. They even requested the
teacher to make them remember so that they could learn. The
students did not differentiate between memorisation and ratna,
though the teachers felt repeating a lesson again and again was
memorising with understanding but ratna was without
understanding. The author discusses the details of memorisation
vs learning. The students believed that in order to learn they
must memories. Many feel that memorisation is an indication of
non-comprehension. Memory must not be emphasised to the point
that knowledge itself becomes like a physical object and burden
to be borne.
The study says the
knowledge acquired in the school is not integrated in a child’s
fabric of understanding he acquires from everyday experience. He
develops an attitude that the textbook—the only source of
knowledge he ought to have—has nothing to do with his local
knowledge of things. The students do not develop reasoning with
local knowledge, for example, placing their own village in
relation to the country as a whole. The book has raised certain
new issues for those designing the syllabi for schoolchildren.
Though the study
is related to a village primary school, the inferences drawn are
common to urban schools and perhaps at the college level also.
The teacher has to be ‘developed’ and not only trained to
understand his role in relation to the child, parents and
society, and put it in the correct perspective while teaching.
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THE
author has tried to construct school knowledge studying a
government-run primary school in a village near Delhi, which is
eagerly developing into a small town. The book is based on the
thesis presented by the author to the Department of Education, Delhi
University, for a Ph.D. degree. The author spent nine months at the
Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study at Tufts University,
Massachusetts, on a pre-doctoral fellowship and many months in the
village to study the teaching-learning process in the Government
Boys’ Model Primary School. Perhaps, this is the first study of
its kind in India which has approached the school to learn about
schooling with the eyes, ears and tools of an anthropologist. The
work is likely to make many educationists sit up and take a note of
it.
