Bangalore: Nouman Sheikh is a free bird these days; he flies kites all day. That’s just what a young boy who has finished class VI should be expected to do all summer.
Sheikh studies in a school affiliated to the ICSE board in north Bangalore and says he feels liberated from “the month-long mugging up” exercise, a reference to the fact that he had to learn lots of things by rote. ICSE stands for Indian Certificate of Secondary Education and the syllabus in ICSE schools is considered the toughest and the most progressive in the country.
Yet, ask Sheikh about the most “fun thing” he did in science through the year, and all he can come up with is one experiment from chemistry class — a burning candle that gets extinguished after a beaker is put on the flame.
That experiment shows air is essential for burning. It also shows how unimaginative science teaching in the country really is.
Things are no better in higher grades. Aymen Sheikh, Nouman’s sister, has just finished class IX in a school affiliated to the Karnataka board. She says she has not visited the school laboratory even once — the school does have a laboratory — and the only practical demonstration she can remember is one where her teacher showed the class how magnets have north and south poles, and how like poles repel and opposites attract.
The problem with
science education in India is a national one, say experts. “This is a nationwide problem which is not so much due to the curricula, which have been revised lately, but because of the examination system,” says Arvind Kumar, director of Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE) in Mumbai and a member of the steering committee of the 2005 National Curriculum Framework of NCERT, or the National Council for Education, Research and Training. The assessment system, which is memory-based and not really a test of comprehension, has to be changed, adds Kumar.
One of the most convincing pieces of evidence on the inability of school students here to understand basic science concepts comes from ASSET, a scholastic skills assessment test conducted by the Ahmedabad-based Educational Initiatives (EI), an organization started by alumni of the Indian Institute of Management to help improve the quality of school education. In a recent survey, 3,668 students of class VI were asked: “If you’re standing on the moon holding a pen, and you let it go, it will:
A) float away, B) float where it is, C) fall to the ground, D) float towards the earth
Only 15% of the students chose the correct option, C; 42% chose option A, which is the most common wrong answer. Clearly, these students do not understand gravity.