Stupidest op-ed of the day: Lessons from India: Blame students, not teachers

It was one of those mornings when I wondered if my life will be more, or less, exciting if my vocation and my hobby alike were not as focused as they are on various public policy issues, which make a news junkie of me.

No, I am not referring to the stock market free fall.

My news addiction means that I catch up with a few local papers, including the Oregonian, which is where I came across this op-ed on the lessons to learn about schooling--from India.

Naturally, I had to read it.

And then got so pissed off with the op-ed--I was reminded of an earlier post on my displeasure at politicians hyping up the "competition" from India.

I have emailed the following to the editor, and am hoping it will be published.

While I appreciate Tracy Groom’s overall objective in her op-ed (August 8^th) to improve the learning conditions in schools here in Oregon, there is very little for me to agree with her observations on India’s education system.

In the first place, comparisons of the US with India conveniently overlook the fundamental point—most of India is poor.  America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s upper-middle class.

Wealth is concentrated in major metropolitan areas.  Thus, cities like New Delhi, where Ms. Groom spent a semester as a Fulbright exchange teacher, often have some of the best schools also.  Typically, schools in such cities have English as the medium of instruction and the students also come from literate families—often highly educated too.  Thus, Ms. Groom’s observations about India’s educational system are highly skewed, at best. 

Even in schools in urban areas, students are often forced to become experts at rote memorization because most of the education in India is less about fostering the ability to think and is more about teaching to the tests.  But then these are the better schools, so to say. 

As one ventures out to the rural areas, conditions deteriorate rapidly.  Many rural schools lack even proper buildings. Students rarely have textbooks and rely on whatever the teachers might ask them to do in the classrooms. Most teachers are horribly ill-qualified and, according to news reports, quite a few of them collect their paychecks even without reporting to work!

If all these fail to dampen the natural curiosities of children, then there is always the possibility of punishment—from forcing students to stand outside under the blistering tropical sun, to beatings.  This is no trivial matter even in India, which is why the Indian government has addressed "corporal punishment" in the “Right to Education Act” that was recently passed. 

There are many more problems that plague India’s education system.  Even a relatively minor observation that Ms. Groom makes about students not needing tutoring services is atrociously incorrect—most parents in India have no choice but to spend a lot of money on private tutors for their children because of the lack of quality teaching at schools, and because of the intense pressure to score well in the all important tests. 

While I could point out a lot more that is incorrect in Ms. Groom’s op-ed, I would instead conclude on the note that many of the elite schools in India’s cities systematically work to introduce American-style education that encourages students to discover their strengths and weaknesses through discussions and learning by doing. 

We need to ensure that Oregon’s schools provide the best environment for the children to be all they can be. But, let us not slide down to towards the lowest common denominator, and that too based on highly uninformed and incorrect judgments on a more “successful” system in a remarkably poor India.  Tracy Groom’s op-ed does a great disservice to India and the US by projecting incorrect impressions about  teachers, students, and parents on the other side of the planet.