[Reader-list] Skipping Rote Memorization in Indian Schools: A New York Times piece

[Chintan Girish Modi]

From
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/business/global/18teach.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hpw
*Skipping Rote Memorization in Indian Schools* By Vikas
Bajaj<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/vikas_bajaj/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published:
February 17, 2011PANTNAGAR, India — The Nagla elementary school in this
north Indian town looks like many other rundown government schools.
Sweater-clad children sit on burlap sheets laid in rows on cold concrete
floors. Lunch is prepared out back on a fire of burning twigs and branches.

But the classrooms of Nagla are a laboratory for an educational approach
unusual for an Indian public school. Rather than being drilled and tested on
reproducing passages from textbooks, students write their own stories. And
they pursue independent projects — as when fifth-grade students recently
interviewed organizers of religious festivals and then made written and oral
presentations.

That might seem commonplace in American or European schools. But such
activities are revolutionary in India, where public school students have
long been drilled on memorizing facts and regurgitating them in stressful
year-end exams that many children fail.

Nagla and 1,500 other schools in this Indian state, Uttarakhand, are part of
a five-year-old project to improve Indian primary education that is being
paid for by one of the country’s richest men, Azim H. Premji, chairman of
the information technology giant Wipro. Education experts at his Azim Premji
Foundation are helping to train new teachers and guide current teachers in
overhauling the way students are taught and tested at government schools.

For Mr. Premji, 65, there can be no higher priority if India is to fulfill
its potential as an emerging economic giant. Because the Indian population
is so youthful — nearly 500 million people, or 45 percent of the country’s
total, are 19 or younger — improving the education system is one of the
country’s most pressing challenges.

“The bright students rise to the top, which they do anywhere in any system,”
Mr. Premji said over lunch at Wipro’s headquarters in Bangalore, 1,300 miles
south of Uttarakhand. “The people who are underprivileged are not
articulate, less self-confident, they slip further. They slip much further.
You compound a problem of people who are handicapped socially.”

Outside of India, many may consider the country a wellspring of highly
educated professionals, thanks to the many doctors and engineers who have
moved to the West. And the legions of bright, English-speaking call-center
employees may seem to represent, to many Western consumers, the cheerful
voice of modern India.

But within India, there is widespread recognition that the country has not
invested enough in education, especially at the primary and secondary
levels.

In the last five years, government spending on education has risen sharply —
to $83 billion last year, up from less than half that level before. Schools
now offer free lunches, which has helped raise enrollments to more than 90
percent of children.

But most Indian schools still perform poorly. Barely half of fifth-grade
students can read simple texts in their language of study, according to a
survey of 13,000 rural schools by Pratham, a nonprofit education group. And
only about one-third of fifth graders can perform simple division problems
in arithmetic. Most students drop out before they reach the 10th grade.

Those statistics stand in stark contrast to China, where a government focus
on education has achieved a literacy rate of 94 percent of the population,
compared with 64 percent in India.

Mr. Premji said he hoped his foundation would eventually make a difference
for tens of millions of children by focusing on critical educational areas
like exams, curriculum and teacher training. He said he wanted to reach many
more children than he could by opening private schools — the approach taken
by many other wealthy Indians.

Mr. Premji, whose total wealth Forbes magazine has put at $18 billion,
recently gave the foundation $2 billion worth of shares in his company. And
he said that he expected to give more in the future.

Those newly donated shares are being used to start an education-focused
university in Bangalore and to expand and spread programs like the one here
in Uttarakhand and a handful of other places to reach 50 of India’s 626
school districts.

The effort’s size and scope is unprecedented for a private initiative in
India, philanthropy experts say. Even though India’s recent rapid growth has
helped dozens of tycoons acquire billions of dollars in wealth, few have
pledged such a large sum to a social cause.

“This has never been attempted before, either by a foundation or a
for-profit group,” said Jayant Sinha, who heads the Indian office of Omidyar
Network, the philanthropic investment firm set up by the eBay founder Pierre
Omidyar.

Although the results in Uttarakhand are promising, they also suggest that
progress will be slow. Average test scores in one of the two districts where
the foundation operates climbed to 54 percent in 2008, up from 37.4 percent
two years earlier. (A passing mark is 33 percent or higher.) Still, only 20
of the 1,500 schools that the foundation works with in Uttarakhand have
managed to reach a basic standard of learning as determined by competence
tests, enrollment and attendance. Nagla is not one of the 20.

“We are working with the kids who were neglected before,” said D. N. Bhatt,
a district education coordinator for the Uttarakhand state government. “You
won’t see the impact right away.”

The Premji Foundation helps schools in states where the government has
invited its participation — a choice that some educational experts criticize
because it seems to ignore fast-growing private schools that teach about a
quarter of the country’s students, including many of India’s poor.

Narayana Murthy, a friend of Mr. Premji and chairman of Infosys, a company
that competes with Wipro, said he admired the Premji Foundation’s work but
worried it would be undermined by the way India administers its schools.

“While I salute Azim for what he is doing,” Mr. Murthy said, “in order to
reap the dividends of that munificence and good work, we have to improve our
governance.”

Mr. Premji says his foundation would be willing to work with private
schools. But he argues that government schools need help more because they
are often the last or only resort for India’s poorest and least educated
families.

Mr. Premji, whose bright white hair distinguishes him in a crowd, comes from
a relatively privileged background. He studied at a Jesuit school, St.
Mary’s, in Mumbai and earned an electrical engineering degree at Stanford.

At 21, when his father died, Mr. Premji took over his family’s cooking oil
business, then known as Western Indian Vegetable Product. He steered the
company into information technology and Wipro — whose services include
writing software and managing computer systems — now employs more than
100,000 people. He remains Wipro’s largest shareholder.

While the foundation has been welcomed by government officials in many
places, the schools in Uttarakhand provide a glimpse of the challenges it
faces.

After visitors left a classroom at Nagla school, an instructor began leading
more than 50 fifth-grade students in a purely rote English lesson,
instructing the students to repeat simple phrases: Good morning. Good
afternoon. Good evening. Good night. The children loudly chanted them back
in unison.

Another teacher later explained that the instructor was one of two
“community teachers” — local women hired by a shopkeeper to help the
understaffed school. Although under government rules Nagla should have nine
trained teachers for its 340 students, it has only four.

Underfunding is pervasive in the district. But so are glimmers of the
educational benefits that might come through efforts like the Premji
Foundation’s.

Surjeet Chakrovarty, now a 15-year-old secondary school student, is a
graduate of Nagla and still visits his old school regularly. The son of a
widower who is a sweeper at a local university, Surjeet aspires to become a
poet and songwriter — something he attributes to the encouragement of his
former teachers at Nagla.

“My teachers here gave me so much motivation to write,” he said.

One of those Nagla teachers, Pradeep Pandey, shared credit with the Premji
Foundation, and its assistance in developing new written and oral tests.

“Before, we had a clear idea of the answers and the child had to repeat
exactly what we had in mind,” Mr. Pandey said. “We can’t keep doing what we
did in the past, and pass them without letting them learn anything.”