In an interview with The Hindu, Prof Anandakrishnan, former Vice-Chancellor of Anna University, who will turn 90 next month, says he is appalled by the mushrooming coaching centres and wants the focus to be on learning.

More than a decade after Tamil Nadu abolished entrance examinations for admission to professional courses on the recommendations of the M Anandakrishnan Committee, the State government has now been forced to open coaching centres to train its own students for NEET. A new entrance test regime is not what Prof Anandakrishnan, former Vice-Chancellor of Anna University, had foreseen. Instead, he wanted the Class XII exams to be the gateway for admissions. In an interview with The Hindu, the eminent academic, who will turn 90 next month, says he is appalled by the mushrooming coaching centres and wants the focus to be on learning. Excerpts:

You were responsible for abolition of the CET in Tamil Nadu. Now the government has gone back to accepting entrance exam, so much so that it is conducting coaching classes for professional courses for government school students. How do you look at this?

I am appalled by the focus on coaching classes. An enormous amount of money is spent by parents and there is tremendous pressure on the children. The mental depression and the temptation to commit suicide comes out of a sense of guilt to which the children are exposed to through these efforts. Along with coaching, the children must be alerted to the stress during the examination. The NEET ambiance to write an examination — putting children under surveillance — could stress them out. [In contrast] The IIT-JEE does not do that. The administrator [of NEET – CBSE] should have a little more common sense. My own feeling is in the long run a good school system should not make the children depend upon any kind of coaching. If the school and curriculum take sufficient care to make children imbibe the fundamentals of every subject which they are exposed to, the children can confidently take any competitive examination.

Does the focus on coaching centres point to incapability of school teachers?

There are two aspects to this question. One is the ability of the teacher to be able to follow what is the meaning of outcome-based education and how do they deliver the learning outcome. And also how do they assess the students on whether the learning outcome has been accomplished. Generally, the teachers need to be inducted into this process. Unfortunately our teacher education curriculum is so atrociously bad that many of them don’t even have the fundamental knowledge of the subject they are teaching. So, we may have to undertake in a mission mode re-induction of the teachers. To train the teachers, the School Education Department should enter into an understanding with universities in every district, and if necessary, even make some monetary contribution.

The university department will undertake to cover the teachers in the subject in a phased manner. They will return to discuss even their lab experiment, fundamentals of the subject and how to convey it to the students. It is the duty of the department to sign a contract with the University. Over a period of two to three years we will make the teachers very competent.

What then is the role of the teacher education university?

Single discipline universities is an aberration only in Tamil Nadu. A university has to be a holistic system where the people are engaged in different knowledge systems are free to interact and children must be exposed to everything that is around them.

There will be a time when a student in one university will be permitted to another university that offers a course of their choice. In less than five years, you will find the students be able to access knowledge through online courses and be able to supplement their knowledge which is not available in their university. Teachers could take open university courses but they will be only learning a subject. But a teacher must learn how to convey it to students, which is very different from learning Physics or Biology.

Another thing that we have pointed out that the hands-on experience, the children should be able to do experiments by themselves. If you look at the New Zealand curriculum, the child in the kindergarten does an experiment by which it understands what is gravity, friction, high temperature, without even telling them what is gravity. There are a number of sites where children are required to do experiments which will reinforce the theory they are learning. Every teacher should be exposed to very stimulating experiments available all over the world, access them through the internet and demonstrate to the children. Every school will have an internet and a computer. At least as a hobby, the children should be able to go and spend three hours in a week in the school.

But teachers could oppose this move as it takes away their holidays too?

I have interacted during this curriculum change with hundreds and thousands of teachers. Out of this large mass of 30,000 or 40,000 you will easily find 20% of teachers who are dedicated and enjoy the process of teaching. These teachers can be requested to spend at least half a day in the school to take the children outside the classroom to an experimental set up, where the children will be excited. As far as the curriculum goes, we have indicated the learning outcome. The parents should also understand the learning outcome. The teachers should try to follow the spirit of learning, explain how the day-to-day life is weaved into the learning process.

So do you anticipate the students of Tamil Nadu Board schools to be on a par with CBSE students, say in three years’ time?

The CBSE curriculum itself will change. What we are hoping is if every child follows the content in the book they will be ready for any competitive exams. In the meantime, the teachers must know the syllabus and they should start following even in the absence of textbooks.