The case for a shift in epistemic focus in Indian education
Any rational individual who has had the misfortune of trudging through the educational system in India will agree with me, if not chastise me for the understatement, when I say that education in our country does about as much good in preparing us for the future as a water gun does in putting out a summer wildfire. Surprisingly, education systems around the world are also plagued with the same issue, albeit in slightly more refined and clearer terms. Every sphere of humanity has been radically transformed in the last few decades: our social dynamics have liberalised to unprecedented levels, our technological progress has revolutionised everything we do from ordering food to flying across the surface of the planet and beyond and we have discovered more about the laws of the universe in the last two decades than in the previous million. Yet, our core approach to education still rests on the assumption that knowledge is power. A knowledgeable teacher is a good teacher and a class with a few dozen curious facts about the economics of war town Tuvalu is considered a valuable class on socio-economic theory. This won’t cut it anymore. We need to change the way we look at education.
At the face of it, the problem may seem superficial. The epistemic foundations of education have never been called into question in the past before and it has produced fairly satisfactory results. It’s easy to peg the problems of education in the last few decades to a lack of implementation of solid policies and a general disincentivization for teachers to engage in good teaching practices. There are also people accusing us of over-reacting: “Ye filthy spoilt millenials are too entitled, back in our day we learnt nuclear physics from a piece of wood with eyes drawn on it and we had to hike 40 kms across thorns to get to a library to find out the square root of two, stop complaining!”.
Perhaps there is a certain degree of truth to those arguments. However, our problems stem from a much deeper issue: Education hasn’t evolved to keep up with the times. There are a few reasons why the traditional model of information dissemination won’t work status quo. We need to acknowledge the fact that the radical progress of the last few decades has generated so much knowledge that it is simply impossible to compress all of the requisite facets of any field into the traditional length of a school or university course. A graduate student in physics looking to work in particle physics at the turn of the 20th century would have needed to know classical mechanics, electromagnetic theory and the very basics of atomic theory that had been discovered at that time. 100 years later, this list would also require quantum mechanics, special relativity, general relativity, quantum field theory, standard model physics and abstract algebra. And if the requirement is to work at the cutting edge, add in a bunch of other fields that are experimentally unverified but speculatively true like supersymmetry and string theory. There is simply no way for a graduate education to impart all of the requisite portions of all of these fields. In fact, there is no need for graduate education to impart information in this way. Information is so readily accessible today that the emphasis should be on training students to pick up and analyse any information they have access to.
Even if, for the sake of argument, we assume that all of this has been crammed into the heads of an unsuspecting caffeine fuelled graduate student, the day this student graduates and steps into the world of actual research and problem solving, the mandate lies on original thought extrapolated from existing knowledge. Simply knowing how an existing law works is barely sufficient because anything that is known is usually not where the cutting edge lies. However, because our education system focuses on information dissemination in a top down approach, graduates usually have no idea how original thought can lead to new information. The ability to have original thought is what determines success or failure in any given field, an ability that is never honed at any educational level.
What we need is a shift from a knowledge based curriculum design methodology to one based on understanding. This curriculum would take a bottom up approach to education. The emphasis is not on gaining information, it’s about how to get to that facet of information using original thought. This is a far more ambitious way of looking at education but it is absolutely essential in today’s day and age. We sacrifice on the amount of information we can deliver but we deliver on how to acquire information and how to generate more of it. In making this change, we equip students to pick up new facets of information at their own whim by simply considering the way that the information was arrived at originally while also training students to carry out and execute original thinking. This relieves the burden on curriculum to cover all aspects of a field in a limited time frame by training students to pick up the necessary information for themselves and also teaching them how to use that information to arrive at original conclusions. This shift in epistemic focuses has to happen universally if we are to continue the progress of civilization at the rate that we have witnessed over the last century. Educationalists have been voicing concerns about this for a while, it is up to policy makers to pick up the slack.
The classrooms of the future should be places to tap into the infinite human potential and the natural curiosity of the human mind to drive forward the wheels of progress. Hopefully, we don’t stagnate in the mud and get stuck in a rut before this much needed change can happen. I’m looking at you CBSE.
