Comment by microarchitect
15 years ago
The problem boils down to just one thing. The teachers don't understand what they're teaching themselves, so they confuse memorization and repetition with learning. The students who are good at this are rewarded because they do better in the exams, and slowly but surely all the joy of understanding science is beaten out of a student.
I can relate to this personally. Until I started college, I really understood what I was learning. I enjoyed doing science and reading about. But then I made the biggest mistake of my life - I didn't put enough effort into preparing for the IIT entrance examinations and didn't make it in.
I started at the second-tier college that I went to and I realized that my teachers didn't know what they were teaching. We were supposed to be learning all this stuff about Fourier series and Laplace transforms, and I couldn't figure out where we were going with all this. I couldn't understand why certain assumptions were made and where they mattered in the proofs. It was all going above my head. When I asked my lecturers, I was branded as a disruptive student. I simply got insulted until I learned to keep my mouth shut.
I didn't do very well in my examinations either. The most marks were given to the students who could reproduce what the teacher said in the cleanest handwriting with the best figures. My writing sucked and my figures were dirty, and I wrote what I understood not what I remembered. I simply had no hope.
A few years later I started a master's degree at a top-tier institution. Man, was this a different experience! I realized I could ask questions and get intelligent answers. I realized my professors actually knew what these proofs were going to useful for! I was finally back in an environment where understanding was valued.
Unfortunately, I still haven't recovered fully. I can see myself understanding more stuff than in the past, but it's something I have to force myself to do. I use tricks I learned from Feynman and others - I try to build a visual model in my head as I'm hearing something and then I ask questions to the model to see if I'm really understanding stuff. I force myself to think about stuff all time. But this process is not automatic, and I can't help but think my undergraduate lecturers beat it out of me.
In India, usually people who could not land a plum corporate job would resort to teaching (UG level) and they are entrusted with the job of shaping the next batch of engineers/artists. Also, teaching as a job is not greatly rewarding financially, hence it is not a popular choice. One could only imagine the outcome.
To state the facts, a school teacher teaching 4/5th grade kids would hardly be given a $150 salary. In second tier cities, it's even lesser.
I would say, not just this, but there is also a huge difference in the line of thought and a tendency to resign oneself to fate, among Indians. That is almost always part of the upbringing. The ones landing up as teachers would resign to their fates and stop (and resist vehemently) any attempt to keep oneself up-to-date or develop their skills.
And the sad part is, even the interested ones are forcibly turned into indifferent ones, due to various socio-cultural changes presently seen in the economically shining nation.
A relevant article: http://www.hindu.com/op/2011/04/24/stories/2011042453622000....
I am also a person who did most of his schooling/college in India. I also have a masters degree from here in the US.
First of all $150 seems meager from the standard of living seen here in America, but an average Indian much makes less per month and food and groceries are dirt cheap in India compared to US, so 150$ is not as bad as it seems to be. In many towns you can have a fantastic meal for under $1. However, teachers are probably paid lesser than they should be in India compared to its standard of living!
Now, to tackle the other question : Does India's school system stifle interest and creativity? To a certain extent Yes. There is not as much emphasis on rational thinking and creativity as you would hope to see. Its getting better, but, to be fair, many people do quite well in spite of such a system. For one - Text books are not inaccurate like how Feynman experienced in Brazil. Most of them are scientifically correct even though I am not sure how well it is broken down so that an ordinary person can understand it.
In India, there is a system in place to provide benefits for "backward castes". This includes reservations in Colleges/Universities and in various other places. So what is happening is that there are disproportionately large number of people trying to compete for those seats that are not reserved(<50%). These people who manage to get to the top tend to be very competent. [Think about it as a billion people fighting for resources that have reservation]. So in a way that explains why India is still producing top class Engineers or scientists but an average Engineer or a scientist may not fare very well globally.
$150 an hour? A day? A week? A month? A year?
I think he means a month. FWIW, I know primary school teachers making half that much in Bangalore.
Oops! Should have mentioned it, as microarchitect said, it's per month.
> In India
Wait, what about in the united states? Sure colleges may have great professors, but what about our lower education which people go through for 80% of their life's education, for many its 100%. Those people are underpaid, and have no incentives to be good, only to get good test pass rates from students on mandatory tests.
I went though highschool getting high 90s in English, and at start of college realized my writing is absolutely atrocious. It took one brilliant seasoned professor drilling us in thinking "right" when it comes to writing to break us out of our old shitty habits. The same happened in math, and I had a professor who just made math enjoyable and applicable to life. Compared to highschool and before... I just knew it, I was good at understanding it, so I just aced it all, it was just numbers and information. There was no interest sparked until college.
Now I am looking for schools for my daughter. And honestly I am looking for those that pay teachers well and have no long-term contracts. That means one thing: perform well or die. Its like programming, if you only hire programmers for prices nobody wants to work at, you will get the bottom of the barrel who could not succeed, so why think they will make your company succeed?
Allow me to clear up one tiny misconception—the professors and the way the syllabus is taught at IITs (at least D) is not that much better either—a large of my part of my syllabus in solid mechanics, etc. (just to name a specific example) was simply glossed over as facts to ingest without even touching the mathematical foundation. I've had to spend a really large part of my final year project revisiting maths, solid mechanics to get that foundation and then build upon it to make a good project.
There have also been particularly memorable incidents where a professor teaching surveying got confused about what sin\theta was.
There is a big difference between knowing something is true and understanding why it's true. A criteria one of the top preparatory schools in Dallas looks for when evaluating candidates for admittance is, does the student ask "Why?".
When you understand why something is true -- the reasons behind it -- you are relating it/connecting it to what you already know and understand. You're creating a Web of associations -- a mental framework you can build on -- you're not learning it in isolation. The most important question anyone can ask is "Why?".
It's also a matter of opportunity. People in the US consider opportunity a given. It's not so in most of the world, people may choose to educate themselves, even forcibly via repetition, because there may not even be other things to do, and it's better to have some kind of education than no education. The exceptional kids of course do not follow that rule, they'll make it no matter what.
To say that there is no opportunity in places like Brazil and India is to blame someone else for your not taking the initiative.
Even in the UK and US the vast majority of the students don't really take advantage of the education system. And those who do are often ridiculed by those that don't.
There is just as much pressure to slack off and underperform in the west as there is to do rote memorisation in Brazil or to cheat on the exams in India.
The system is never to blame for you not taking the opportunities that are there. The system is not to blame for your slackness.
So long as you never take responsibility for your results, you will get crap results.
Those guys you see in India who are rich and successful, I guarantee you they didn't sit around pissing and moaning about how because the system is bad there are no opportunities. They grabbed a big double handle of life's balls and went out and made their own opportunities.
That's what i'm saying, the real smart guys know better. I said opportunities are not as abudant as in the US, not that there's none of them (at some point the reverse will be true) . But it's also true that in the emerging economies there is state-sponsored push towards higher education coupled with the rise of the middle classes which leads to these phenomena. You do find disinterested students more often in countries where people don't have an incentive to quit university and pursue their real talents. Unfortunately this leads to lower quality of education. On the flip side, thanks to the internet there's a whole world of information out there readily available to anyone who cares.