India’s text-book mafia educators and the creation of copy-paste bots

Fudged marks in school exams are really the least of India’s problems. My grandmother started a primary school, which my mother now runs, and since 2011 or so, I often take stock of what’s going on. The school is a feeder school to the bigger CBSE/ISC schools in the neighborhood, so it needs to follow a similar pattern, so that students don’t get a rude shock when they move to bigger schools after Class 5.

Most of what I see gives me a fit. Everyone in India knows that most of our schooling is very little, beyond memorizing and rote learning. But like everything else in this disaster of a country, it starts and ends as a dinner table conversation as best. “The system is bad, it needs to be fixed, blah blah. But, you know, what to do, the system is the system, as crappy as it may be…”

Here’s a class 5 textbook teaching … LOGO! straight from the dinosaur era

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Here’s a Class 1 Computer Textbook — Hey. 4 year old, time for you to cram some definitions

Recently, however, I did meet the administrator of a well-respected group of schools in NCR, which gave me some hope. The school was a regular CBSE school, but had creatively bypassed the usual CBSE curriculum in everything other than the board classes. They had their own sets of novels and books, case studies, school trips, hands-on activities with a real-world focus and they didn’t really stick to depressing Indian text-books. They’d introduce the exam-oriented board-focused teaching only by the end of Class 11, to make sure the students were in line with the exam-temperament for the board and entrance exams at the end of Class 12. I thought this was a brilliant idea. It was working fine — the school had an average placing it in the top 50 schools based on CBSE’s results, even though they consciously bypassed a rather worthless rote-learning based exam system. There are a few other progressive schools in the country which follow this style. They maintain a practical, real-world focus; groom their students to observe the world; build up excellent language skills, and bother about putting their kids in exam mode only somewhere after the middle of class 11 — so that students don’t get a sudden shock while facing public exams.

Unfortunately, there aren’t too many such schools. Except for the international schools, which are very expensive. For 10–12 years, kids are being treated as information dumps, not because it is necessarily required even to do well in board exams, but because a lot of mediocre, marginally educated hacks, have colluded with publishers to print books which are full of unnecessary information.

So if people wonder why the Indian kid needs to memorize so much, the answer is very simple! Things are taught only because they exist in books. And they exist in books, only because a publisher and the author have an economic incentive to print utterly unnecessary books, which are pointlessly thick — because the thicker the book, the more one can charge for it.

Stamp the cover page of a class 4 book with a note about being “compliant with CBSE CCE/ICSE syllabus” and hey, you’ve convinced the teachers that you have a book which starts preparing your 8 year old kid for the exam which gives him a date-of-birth certificate.

If you think I’m exaggerating, take a look at Computer books for class 1, 2, 3.

They actually have chapters explaining GUI commands and software like Paint which doesn’t really need textbooks to explain!

And so, the very technology which make memorization completely irrelevant, in an age where information is available at ones’ fingertips , Computer and Internet — have themselves become a subject to memorize for 4–7 year olds, because some shady publisher can make more money that way.

Similarly, geography books for class 3 and 4 students are filled with details about crops and industries in each an every state of India. Details which will be forgotten as soon as the exam is over. General Knowledge. Moral Science books full of questions on the specifics of stories, rather than general values to be imbibed. More and more opportunities for publishers to sell trash. The list never ends. There’ll be books, which have accompanying work-books, which in turn will have guide books and solutions.

What are the consequences of all this?

This one is about 10x as important as all other points to follow. A kid is burdened with pointless subjects and topics for no good reason other than the publisher and author profiting from this vicious cycle. In the early years, the kid is just about learning to develop the basic skills of reading, writing and basic arithmetic. This is a time consuming process, especially for students in English medium schools, whose parents are not so familiar with English. What is more important — to give them time and space to develop those basic skills, or to bombard them with facts to “by heart” and reproduce verbatim in exams. Let them learn and cram a little less and imbibe a bit more. I asked about thirty kids in Class 5, whether they knew what a right angle is. Most of them were able to provide the 90-degree definition correctly. However, when I pointed to the table and asked them to show me a right angle in the real world, it took a long time for even one or two of them to recognize that the corners were right angles. One can’t blame the kids or their teachers — there are bucket-loads and gigabytes of info being poured onto them on a daily basis. They were being taught History, Geography, Civics, Moral Science, GK, Computers and what not; at a time when they weren’t even prepared to write a page long essay on their own, without preparation.

5. For all the excessive details of civics we learnt in class 9 and 10, we can barely remember the outline of what we were taught. How much does someone retain and remember in the long term? That is what should be considered by those designing the syllabus and setting the question papers. But hey, that won’t be very beneficial for publishers.

Anyway, I tried to convince the primary teachers of our school to scale back at least a bit, do no more than 3–4 chapters per subject (instead of 5–6) and leave the kids with more breathing space and more time and bandwidth to get their basic English and Arithmetic skills in place.

Such suggestions are invariably seen as “deterioration of standards”, though. People will cite how the current text-books are in line with CBSE/ICSE etc. Everytime someone does this, I remind them that those are boards of “secondary education” (class 9 and above) and don’t even prescribe a syllabus till that stage. And that schools will be better off if they use their own brains to structure out a less over-whelming curriculum instead of leaving that part to overzealous publishers. But using one’s own mind is apparently a rather un-Indian thing.

Let me also name and shame some of the scoundrels who have misused their educational posts to indulge in this kind of behavior.

Ashok Ganguly, former CBSE head and an ex-IAS officer, who indirectly promoted books of private publishers; and an ex-CISCE head, (Late) Francis Fanthome who co-authored over sixty books in subjects as diverse as social studies and computers. Anil Wilson (late), head of St. Stephen’s college in Delhi was te editor of several ICSE text-books like this, this and this . Why on earth does the board need to prescribe a version of Julius Ceaser edited by a specific person? It’s not so hard to comprehend: his wife, Rita Wilson, held a rather senior post in the board at that time. Similarly, why did the board need a compilation of standard poems, edited by a specific author and sold by a particular publisher? The vicious cycle of cuts and commissions is not to difficult to spot. Rita Wilson’s successor, Gerry Arathoon, has also succumbed to this enterprising temptation and after a brief expulsion for this bad behavior he is back in business.

Yeah, so if you’re a school administrator, please THINK before prescribing a book. Is it required? Or is it something which fills the pockets of the likes of the above? This is specially true for senior classes where lots of junk will be subtly pushed down via publishers, in the name of being something which helps with board exams and entrance tests.