Hum kaagaz zaroor dikhayenge

    The National Education Policy of 2020 has led to the establishment of an academic bank of credits where one can store one’s course completion progress verifiables and redeem them for a certificate, a diploma or a degree. Change is the only constant and if matters are unsatisfactory, as much of our education system is, we must strive to change it continually in order to achieve a more just education system. Striving towards the hitherto unknown is not the point of education. We do not wrench our hands in despair because we cannot stop the rotation of the earth. We do not expect our immediate education to achieve such unexpected seemingly impossible results. Education is often seen as a way of knowing what others already know and of catching up with them in terms of status, be it intellectual, social or financial. As an end-product of education, we seek the fairness that society otherwise denies us. It is debatable whether education exacerbates the inequalities that exist in society outside educational institutions or whether education is the panacea to undo the inequalities that beset society.
Striving towards universal literacy as a first step is a fairly modern state of affairs if one considers the history of humankind. Being literate and going through the educational system is something without which centuries of human beings have gone through, leading lives no less or no more happier than ours. What then is the point of education?
Certificates, diplomas and degrees—till recently these were only material objects and now they are soon to be available also in a demat form. What do they indicate? Do they indicate anything more than what a personal interview or a practical demonstration of skills can indicate? I would argue that the answer is no. However, interacting personally with applicants in the job sector or asking them to demonstrate their skills before hiring them is impractical. Hence, these verifiables. They are supposed to authenticate a certain standard and magnitude of satisfactory skills that job-seekers possess and that is required to complete the job that they are offering to do.
Till this new academic bank of credits churns out its first batch of certificates and diplomas, such verifiables indicated that their beholder had completed a course. Now, in addition to that meaning, they will also indicate that their possessor has failed to complete a course that they had signed up for. Instead of being solely a mark of achievement, they will also become a mark of failure. Dropping out of courses is like life. It happens. The academic bank of credits is being implemented in only the top institutions which follow the UGC’s mandate. The rank and file of the Indian higher education system is not required to follow them. Presumably, this is so because the authors of the NEP envisage that those who had managed to secure admission to the top institutions are the crème de la crème of the Indian school education system and hence they are savvy enough to drop out of a course and yet possess a set of skills that entrants to less distinguished institutions lack. The new certificates and diplomas will be a mark of failure but for those who will seemingly wear it as a badge of pride with an illustrious school education pedigree.
How to make the best of what is afoot and how may it be tweaked in order to further the idea of a more just education system? What to do with higher education drop-outs? Vocational education, which we need more of but which is often upheld as a second-grade alternative to the conventional three/ four/ five year undergraduate course, is an alternative but how to bring it into this system? Sajid Javid, the conservative UK politician, had school grades which were deemed low and he was offered a vocational educational track. He went on to change schools so that he could escape the vocational track which the educational system was offering him as the only choice. Changing schools led him onto a career path which made him one of the global heads of Deutsche Bank, a position one may argue more intellectually strenuous to get oneself into than that of a cabinet minister. Generally, opting for vocational education often signals the end of more bookish education.
If one is not aghast at offering vocational education to drop-outs from the top UGC-led institutions, one would see how the academic bank of credits is a good way to prevent drop-outs in higher education and also offer vocational education as a realistic career path.
Studying one year of humanities of a two or more year course, dropping out, and then leaving with a certificate is neither here nor there. Substitute the humanities with any other branch of study and the result is the same. One does not learn either the history of a literature or the fundamentals of a science or of a branch of engineering in one year. If all three/ four/ five year undergraduate courses were so arranged that all non-major subjects are studied only in the first year, then that would increase the chances that at the end of the first year when one becomes eligible to get at least a certificate, one has some basic knowledge of communication and the basics of the humanities, social sciences, sciences, commerce or any other stream. If the student drops out after having cleared the first year exams, handing over a certificate is unlikely to make it a useful verifiable. What is likely to prove useful is that those first year credits will be stored in the academic bank. S/he can utilise the time after dropping out to re-assess oneself and decide if s/he wants to re-enter higher education and if so, whether to pursue the same stream as earlier or a new stream. Year one of humanities basics, year two of science intermediate and year three of engineering advanced is impractical. However, year one of humanities basics, followed by year two of vocational intermediate and advanced is likely to prove more useful. Year one basics, if they do not focus on the core discipline courses but instead is all the minor, extra departmental general skill enhancement courses that are peppered throughout the current three/four/ five year structure, are likely to prove useful. Years two to higher should focus only on the core courses.
The year two exit point which is now going to hand over a diploma may similarly be re-designed. A diploma in the history of literature where one is aware of the history of literature in some eras but not in others or a diploma in computer science where one is aware of the ‘for’ loop and the two-dimensional array but not of the SQL database is unlikely to be useful. Year two must be designed in such a manner that it offers the complete basics of the core courses. Given my profession as a literature teacher, one suggestion would be to impart the skills required to scan lines of poetry, to identify figures of speech and form a general idea of the overview of literature as the subject matter of year two. If a student drops out after year two and decides that literature is not his/ her area of interest, a diploma in literature is unlikely to equip the student with skills which are perhaps necessary to teach literature in a school but it is perhaps enough to enable the student to pick a profession where language skills are required, for instance, as a mass communication professional.  Given the basics of extra departmental courses that s/he undertook in year one, the student would also have formed a general view of the stream that s/he enrolled in. The student should have an option to do year two of a vocational education course even then. The student may return to literature studies and complete year three and if there is a year four, then that too but if not, the student should be able to pursue vocational education and get down to the meat of it without re-doing basic general skills courses which most programmes contain.
The idea of the NEP to prevent drop-outs in higher education is noble. How best to execute it? Handing out verifiables which do not verify knowledge but rather that one passed some exams is unlikely to further the cause of Indian higher education. In the unequal world that we live in, more people are likely to possess a verifiable than earlier. Yet, the value of that verifiable would be paltry and the inequalities that education seeks to address would remain. What students need when they find themselves wandering and lost is to be pushed in a direction where they can find a more dignified way than the one they would have made their way into as a drop-out.

English departments in India by UGC-Special Assistance Programme status

As found through search engines on the internet

1. Centre of Advanced Study (CAS)
a) Jadavpur University (Phase 3)

2. Department of Special Assistance (DSA) 

a) University of Delhi (Phase 3)
b) Jawaharlal Nehru University (Phase 2)

c) University of Hyderabad (Phase 2)

3. Departmental Research Support (DRS)

a) University of Calcutta (Phase 3)

b) Jamia Millia Islamia (Phase 3)

c) Osmania University (Phase 2)

d) Vidyasagar University (Phase 2)

e) University of Kerala (Phase 2)

f) Tezpur University (Phase 2)

g) Visva Bharati University (Phase 2)

h) Aligarh Muslim University (Phase 2)

i) Panjab University

The legacy of David Attenborough

             His voice has enthralled millions across the world. His now-abandoned Instagram account was the fastest to be followed by a million people. He is often considered to have seen the most number of places in the world, starting his overseas sojourns soon after the Second World War when air travel started to become popular and seeing them before some of them disappeared from the face of the earth. The images that he brought alive on screen from the greenest jungles to the whitest polar regions to the bluest oceans with their giant whales and multicoloured marine life have made a large section of the TV watching population more aware of the earth and the various non-human species which inhabit it. He has been lucky enough to have enjoyed good health and be involved with a job he likes well into his late 90s. His work ethic is comparable to his Queen Elizabeth II, born seventeen days before him. The world, and its various species, has been lucky to have him around.
            His legacy may seem to mirror the smoothness of the vivid images which he presented on screen. Yet, there have been those who have had issue with his legacy. By presenting nature as undisturbed, was the urgency of climate change and the endangered nature of the landscapes and life he was presenting toned down? By travelling across the world and presenting uncommon images, was he enticing the rich to follow suit and did he threaten the sustainability of the environments he presented by attracting tourists?
            Son of an academic father and a mother who was interested in the arts, David Attenborough was born into a cultured household. By the time, he took up a job at the BBC, his elder brother Richard had already become a fairly well-known actor on both the stage as well as the screen. His early life and his initiation into the appreciation of the natural world have been recounted by him in various media to the point where his regular followers know there is little new to learn in another iteration of it. His discovery of ammonite fossils in commercial mines near his childhood home in Leicester, his father urging him to find out about them from the natural history museum and guiding him to seek knowledge from experts and find out on one’s own instead of being spoon-fed with answers on the tap, his reading of the nineteenth-century explorer and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and his acquired fascination for birds of paradise, studying zoology and geology at Cambridge and later studying social anthropology — these have been well-documented in his various memoirs.
            Much of his early work with the BBC does not survive owing to the limitations of technology and the cost of film reel during the 1950s. His career in the nascent medium of the television and with movie cameras placed him at the vanguard of technological advancements in the medium. Till date, pioneering visual reproduction techniques have been often used in natural history movie productions much before they have made their way to fiction movie productions.
            When we think of natural history movie productions, we think of the BBC’s natural history unit in Bristol. David Attenborough never worked for that unit. He was born in the greater London area and other than the period when his father was working at Leicester, he has maintained residence in the greater London area. Desmond Hawkins, a young producer in the BBC’s west region, started producing a series of programmes on natural history for the radio. He wanted to move to the television department and suggested starting a natural history unit in Bristol. Attenborough was invited to join the department but declined preferring to stay in London with the family he had just started. Thus began the sequence of long-distance collaboration of the BBC’s natural history unit and which continues to this day with its team of producers and film makers working across the globe but knowing that they will find a haven for their footage at Bristol. Even though the BBC has a licence fee to achieve some kind of balance in financial sheets, the pressures that a public service broadcaster faces has forced many of these filmmakers to find other outlets for their productions. American streaming services such as Netflix and Apple TV+ have taken on some such content to satiate the craving for natural history that exists across the globe but the sustained support and nurturing that the BBC provides is perhaps unique in the history of moving pictures.
            Natural history film making and watching may seem repetitive. Yet, with advancements in technology, the art of making and the details which one can watch keep changing all the time. Has the focus of Attenborough’s film making also changed with time? Surely it has. In the 1950s, one saw much more of him on the screen. He was there in the forest, on top of the tree, hidden in the bushes, with animals crawling over him. The 1950s were when the UK was still experiencing a loss of its colonies. But colonial trajectories and colonial projects and mindsets were very much enmeshed in the population of the UK. The journeys that Attenborough made in the 1950s were often to former colonies—to British occupied Guyana rather than French, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese colonised Guiana, to Papua New Guinea rather than Indonesian Papua. His 1950s Zoo Quest series was, as the title, implied, about animals and zoos. Zoos or animals in captivity were far removed from animals in their natural habitat as portrayed in natural history film making. The Zoo Quest series was about collecting animals. One may even say stealing animals. This brings to attention the idea of using animals as museum collectibles, as an object to be stared at. Since the 1970s when climate change and environmentalism started to become significant issues globally, the idea of the zoo has changed drastically in some places whereas in some settings, it has remained similar to the idea of the menagerie of ancient times. Reading his 2002 Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (available both as a book to be read as well as in audiobook format read by Attenborough) may make the modern reader appalled and cringe at such blatant continuation of the colonial project. However, one must realise that to see is to be aware. When one thinks of scientific experimentation on animals which disappeared from public spectacle after the 1670s and was hidden behind the laboratory door or the rise of industrial meat farming and abattoirs in the nineteenth century which concealed some animals from public view, one realises that it has coincided with the change in human relationship to other species.
            David Attenborough’s most important legacy is to make people aware of the natural world. Without awareness of the variety of life on earth, we would have been less compelled to look at the larger picture of the perils of climate change. It is easy to think of one’s immediate surroundings as the be-all and end-all such as when the 45^th POTUS scorned at the idea of global warming because of a particularly frosty American east coast winter even though that year was the hottest year on earth recorded till then. To overcome such scepticism, often propounded by political leaders because of a combination of ignorance and vested interests and who have mass followings, the images are necessary to bring greater awareness. Images not only of sooty skies above industrial landscapes but also of the beauty of our planet, of the variegated clownfish, the almost-extinct brightly coloured corals, of the savannas and of the birds of paradise in the rainforests, and the Antarctic sea lions. In order to save the planet, we need to be empathetic to it and its beauty.
            Attenborough’s shift to raising environmental awareness, combining academia and accessibility, happened sometime in the late 1990s. Before that, in the 1970s, shortly after completing a postgraduate course in social anthropology, Attenborough also presented programmes about people and cultures, rather than on just animals. His A Blank on the Map (1971) about people in New Guinea was one such programme. A more accessible production of this kind is the 10-minute BBC radio episode titled ‘Adam’s Face’, Life Stories (2009). His first programme to deal exclusively with the human effect on the natural world was State of the Planet in the year 2000. It may be that the programme should have been made twenty years earlier. Late to bring this to the scene he may have been, but he has been at it ever since. Natural history film making is now much more collaborative and is a much larger team effort than it was in the 1960s when it was just Attenborough and a few of his colleagues. Attenborough is often now the writer of his shows and sometimes he contributes with only his comforting voice as the narrator. His on-screen appearance is limited to a sequence or two and is a minuscule portion of the total recording that took place. Yet he is there to bring home the message. The 2020 David Attenborough: A Life on our Planet had him shooting in the abandoned ruins of Chernobyl.
            He shot a few programmes in India in 1960. Since then, he has returned to India to shoot various programmes. He has been awarded with honours in India as well. Biju Patnaik, in the half century after independence, had been associated with the annual Kalinga Prize for the Popularisation of Science. After awards to Julian Huxley in 1953 and Konrad Lorenz in 1969, David Attenborough was awarded this UNESCO prize in 1981. More recently, shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic began and most of the world went into lockdown, the Indira Gandhi prize, which was set up shortly after the death of Indira Gandhi, was awarded to Attenborough. The trustees perhaps had the occasion to watch some of his productions in the lockdown. The Year Earth Changed (2021), about the restorative effects of the lockdown, had him just as the narrator. He may have been late in alerting his viewers to the biggest threat to this planet but perhaps his viewers should not be late in acknowledging the joy of awareness that is brought into the lives of millions of TV viewers by David Attenborough.

Russian version of जुते दे दो पैसे ले लो

From Mikhail Sholokhov, Quiet Flows the Don, tr. Robert Daglish (Moscow: Raduga, 1988), vol. 1, p. 100

 

Koloda Dua—original Cossack folk song which inspired Pete Seeger’s ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’

From Mikhail Sholokhov, Quiet Flows the Don, tr. Robert Daglish (Moscow: Raduga, 1988), vol. 1, p. 27

‘Money, money, money, it’s a rich man’s world’

Annie Lowrey, ‘Could index funds be “worse than Marxism”?’ The Atlantic, April 5, 2021

An analysis of the depiction of overcoming school educational challenges among weak students in Nil Battey Sannata and Dhh

 

Introduction

            This brief article attempts to analyse the depiction of overcoming school educational challenges among weak students in two recent Indian movies, namely Nil Battey Sannata (2016, now available on streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video and Jio Cinema) and Dhh (2017, now available on streaming services such as Netflix). Whereas the first is a Hindi film directed by Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, the second is a Gujarati film directed by Manish Saini. Both these films were the debut feature films of these directors. Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari worked at an Indian branch of the US advertising agency Leo Burnett, and she claims that the story of the film was inspired by the real-life stories she heard while producing a commercial for the popular TV game show Kaun Banega Crorepati. Manish Saini, on the other hand, was a student at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and according to him, the idea for the film was inspired by his experience at a magic show in Ahmedabad during those days when he noticed some young boys reacting very excitedly to the magician. Whereas the Hindi film was successful enough to warrant a Tamil remake in the same year, the Gujarati film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Gujarati. Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari and her spouse and former colleague, Nitish Tiwari, have gone on to have a subsequent career in Bollywood. Manish Saini, on the other hand, has not made any feature films thereafter.

 

Plot summary

            A brief summary of the plots of the two movies is perhaps necessary for those who have not watched the movies. In Nil Battey Sannata, a young woman, Chanda works as a domestic cleaner cum cook (or as is termed in Hindi, a bai) and also works odd jobs in a factory to supplement her income. She is either widowed or divorced. It is not made evident in the film. Her life revolves around dreams for her daughter. Her daughter Apeksha, however, is more world-weary and refuses to dream for a better life. She is cynical and does not believe in social mobility. She assumes that she too will have to work as a bai when she grows up. The movie begins with her studying in class 10 and struggling with all subjects but especially with mathematics. Her mother is shocked to hear that Apeksha has no big dreams and is satisfied with her lot in life. Chanda desperately wants her daughter to succeed and as one of her employers tells her, it is either kismat (luck) or mehnat (hard work) which allows for social mobility. Since poor people are out of kismat anyway, all that they are left with is hard work. However, her daughter refuses to work hard because she is cynical and demotivated. In order to motivate her, Chanda herself joins Apeksha’s school as a student in class 10. Chanda was a class 10 dropout herself before she began working as a bai. Realising the effort her mother was making to dream of a better future for her, Apeksha manages to study hard, understand mathematics and pass her class 10 examinations. The film ends with her appearing for an IAS interview, the dream job her mother had envisaged.

            Dhh is about three boys of middle-class background who are backbenchers in school and who do not have much interest in studies. The three boys are not homogeneous in character. One of the boys, Kapil, is average in studies, one, Chirag, poor and another, Bajrang, very poor. They hang out together and as a result the boy who is average in studies also starts to perform poorer than usual. Being friends and hanging out together make them a group which is punished together by their teachers. They go to watch a magic show and then realise that the only way they can pass their exams is if something miraculous such as being granted magic powers happen. They write letters to the magician. They request the grandfather of one of the boys, Chirag, to take them to meet the magician but the grandfather refuses using some excuse or the other. One day they receive a letter from the magician along with a small wooden toy. The magician tells them that if they recite their text books to the toy and they take the toy with them to their examination halls, the toy will tell them the answers to the questions. The boys are encouraged by this seeming short-cut and they spend hours reciting their text books to this toy. One of the boys mentions to the other two that this toy will help them in all subjects except mathematics as reciting the text book will not prove a useful method to get the answers to the questions in their mathematics examination. He mentions that it is one subject which the students need to study on their own. Later on, the boys discover that their letters never reached the magician nor did the magician write back to them. Rather, the grandfather in cahoots with the local postman, received their letters and sent them the letter and the toy. The grandfather’s logic was that if the boys believed they could pass, then they would work hard to make their belief come true and all those hours of reciting the text book to the toy helped them memorise the text book and it helped them in their examinations. Whereas Kapil who was never very bad in studies comes second in class, Chirag, who was average in studies, comes third but Bajrang who was very weak in studies manages to pass and is the most overjoyed.

 

Plot analysis

            What both the movies highlight is that with encouragement and motivation even the weakest of students can manage to at least pass examinations. Whereas both movies are well-made and inspirational, they do indirectly highlight certain issues affecting the education system. The most important issue that they indirectly draw attention to is that education is made synonymous with examinations. The goal of the education system is to pass examinations and score well in examinations. The learning outcome is not highlighted. In Nil Battey Sannata, emphasis is laid on memorising mathematical formulae. Chanda, the mother, makes rhymes to memorise mathematical formulae and her daughter also benefits from those rhymes or mnemonics to aid memorisation. Mathematical formulae, in the movie, become something to be memorised and applied. The practical use of such knowledge or the relevance or irrelevance of trigonometry to the lives of citizens in general is not made an issue in the movie. In Dhh, memorisation and quiz-question type assessment systems are highlighted. The viewer does not get to see how memorising their study material helps those students except for passing examinations and education is seen as a case of scoring high marks and outscoring rivals. The competitive nature of the examination system is indirectly highlighted through the movie.

 

Indian education system

            The Indian education system is often criticised for encouraging rote learning. At the same time, this rote learning is said to benefit Indian students in subjects such as mathematics and computer engineering. The most popular computer applications are made in the US and the largest number of foreign workers who work in the computer engineering industry in the US are from India. This perhaps proves that the Indian education system is not totally without merit in advanced modern educational fields such as computer engineering. All said and done, those leaving Indian shores for computer engineering jobs abroad probably reflect the cream of the Indian computer engineering education system or the Indian education system as a whole. Rote learning in fields such as the humanities, where there is perhaps less focus on memorisation and reproduction at the higher education level and where open-book examinations are not much of an issue at that level, leads to a decline in critical thinking where students independently assess matter based on their wide reading. Rote learning encourages learning only what is necessary. Wide reading encourages reading completely irrelevant matter because no field of studies is an island in itself. Ultimately, all forms of human knowledge are inter-connected.

            How to align this idealistic view of education with the ground realities of breaking free past the initial barriers of the examination system? These two movies provide different creative takes on overcoming such challenges. If one thinks of overcoming hand-to-mouth survival situations, an idealistic view of livelihoods and food intake is neither desirable nor practical. However, in a situation where a student is struggling to pass and has lost interest in studying, an idealistic view of education may or may not be practical. What the two movies demonstrate is that what changes the situation is a different sense of motivation. In Nil Battey Sannata, it is empathy for her mother which motivates Apeksha to study. In Dhh, the motivation is provided by the hope that they can overcome the barrier of passing examinations. None of these motivational factors is brought about by a change of pedagogy or a change of the assessment system. Rather, the motivation is external to the education system and is personal in nature. The intrinsic deficits of the education system, if any, which de-motivate the students in the first place, remain. The system does not change. The students have found a way to work their way through the system. The fault is ascribed to the students rather than to the system. If some students can work their way through the system, other students also need to find a way through it. Education is then seen as a set of exercises which needs to be completed, a game which has to be played irrespective of whether one wants to play it or not. In Nil Battey Sannata, there is a reward at the end of all the games—the job of an IAS officer. In Dhh, the immediate game is all that matters as far as the plot of the movie is concerned.

 

Preventing school drop out

            The latest Indian Ministry of Education’s Education Statistics at a Glance is from 2018[1] and the latest data in that report is from the financial year 2015-16 in some cases and 2014-15 in other cases. So, there is an approximate six-year and sometimes seven-year time-lag in the data available in January 2021. The report states that the Gross Enrolment Ratio is 92.81% at the upper primary level in class 6, 80.01% at the secondary level in class 9, and 56.16% at the higher secondary level in class 11.[2] Thus, a large number of students are out of school.

            The reasons for leaving school are not always financial. Students drop out of school for other reasons such as disinterest in studies because of being unable to follow lessons, problems in going to schools physically, repeatedly failing in school examinations, mental health issues brought about by factors other than the ones mentioned above, and social stigma against education and which is especially applicable to girls, among other reasons.[3]

            All these students who drop out of school spend most of their daytime with either family members or with other students who have dropped out of school or are involved in some kind of work.  The dropped-out students who spend most of their daytime with other dropped-out students are in a dangerous area of juvenile existence where there is no proper guidance and there is a large amount of association with those left behind by society. This group is especially vulnerable to the worst forms of occupation, thought-processes and activities that exist in society.[4] Thus, it is important to prevent drop-outs at the school level in order to create a better society.

            The Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education in India is around 25%. While one may argue that higher education is not necessary for all professions and in the deeply hierarchical society in which we live and given the lack of number of jobs available to most graduates, higher education for 100% of the population is not desirable as it leads to highly-qualified graduates doing jobs which require a much lower level of educational qualification.[5] This is true not only for government jobs in substantive posts in the lowest scales of pay where the pay is much higher for such jobs as compared to other such jobs in the private unorganised sector but also of jobs in general in the private unorganised sector where it is likely that even postgraduates are employed in sectors where basic literacy is all that matters.

            While dropping out of the education system after completing school may be defended given the nature of our society, being in school and completing school education is essential not only because it may improve the nature of jobs which one may get in life but also because the human mind is considered more vulnerable till the age of reaching adulthood than other age groups. Therefore, a school is one of the safest places for children to be in till reaching adulthood. Schools can also be vulnerable to children if they are bullied or abused in school but more often than not schools provide a safer refuge for children as compared to being outside both a school and one’s home. It is therefore important to retain children in school and ensure that they complete at least school education.

            The two movies discussed earlier portray attempts by the children to remain in school. Especially in the case of Nil Battey Sannata where the student is from a much lower economic class than the middle-class students in Dhh, the student’s mother, Chanda, and one of her employers, discuss what will happen if Apeksha fails to clear her class 10 examinations. Both the elderly women realise that the girl might discontinue her studies and not complete her secondary level education if that happens. They foresee a bleak future for the student if she fails at that hurdle. Apeksha is cynical and thinks that the limits of a human’s potential are circumscribed by the guardian’s class, status and profession. It is likely that if Apeksha failed, she too would hang out with other female students who dropped out of school. She would either be married off at an early age or she would have to take up jobs working as a domestic help as her mother. Completing her school education would provide Apeksha with not only better job prospects but would also boost her confidence considerably and make her less cynical about life.

            Nil Battey Sannata also depicts adult education where Chanda, Apeksha’s mother, also gets re-admitted in class 10 and tries to complete her secondary level education and pass her secondary examination. The movie does not provide any hint as to how that may help Chanda except that it works as a motivational factor for Apeksha to complete her education. The movie project’s Chanda’s adult education as a step in Apeksha’s education. Chanda is not educating herself in order to improve her own life but rather to improve the life of her daughter. The movie does not hint as to whether Chanda’s quest for her own education will improve her own job prospects. She was working as a domestic help who cleans and cooks in other people’s households as well as working odd jobs in small factories or working as a dishwasher in roadside eateries. Given the trajectory of her career so far and her age, she may very well continue in such careers. Whether she will be able to put her secondary level education to use to improve her career is not hinted at in the movie.

            In Dhh, the student who is weakest at studies, Bajrang, belongs to a family where his father is illiterate. The movie shows Bajrang fraudulently obtaining his father’s thumb imprint on his report card. If Bajrang fails at his examinations, it may have been that his father would have taken him out of the education system. Given Bajrang’s young age and his precarious academic abilities, had he been taken out of the education system, he may very well have regressed back to a state of illiteracy or extremely poor reading and numerical abilities. As it is, the quality of primary education in India is dire. The non-government organisation Pratham (established in 1996) has been publishing an Annual Status of Education Report since 2005 which carries surveys about the reading and numerical abilities of primary school children. There is an alarmingly significant percentage of students who have progressed to higher classes but who are not able to read or perform numerical tasks which are considered achievable by students in much lower standards. Bajrang’s hypothetical regression to illiteracy may have not only hampered his job prospects but had he hung out with other school drop-outs, it would have made his peer group a group of other children and young adults who have been left behind by society’s progress and have been left to fend for themselves using whatever means possible. Thus, it was imperative for Bajrang to remain in school and complete his school education to improve both his job prospects as well as remain in a more disciplined milieu during his childhood years.

 

The way ahead

            School drop-out rates have to be reduced. Repeatedly failing in school examinations is unlikely to decrease school drop-out rates. Failing once in a class may be acceptable but failing twice in the same class is a dire situation. It points to students having completely lost pace with the teaching methodology. How to prevent that? How to motivate students to keep pace with what is being taught? The two movies discussed here present previously less motivated children re-motivating themselves whereas the teaching methodology and assessment system remains intact. Another solution is perhaps for these two external factors to change to re-motivate students who fail to keep pace with the pedagogical system. The two movies highlight efforts on part of the students rather than efforts on part of the administrators of the educational system or the teachers. Taare Zameen Par (2007) highlighted the effort on the part of teachers for re-motivating students. However, Nil Battey Sannata and Dhh on the one hand, and Taare Zameen Par on the other hand, highlight individual attempts at remedying the situation. There is a lack of systemic changes involved, which perhaps accurately reflects the lack of systemic changes in the overall pedagogical system in India and in most other parts of the world. Syllabi change, technology and infrastructure change but the focus on examinations and rote learning, and the sense of detachment and disaffection that a large section of students feel for the matter being taught to them keeps the system more or less the same in its pedagogical technique. Experimental schools exist in some countries where hands-on learning and a more engaged pedagogical approach is available to students but those schools and students are far removed from the disadvantaged systems of schools and students depicted in Nil Battey Sannata and Dhh.

            The National Education Commission of India in the mid-1960s headed by Daulat Singh Kothari, the then chairperson of the University Grants Commission, had recommended that India spend 6% of its GDP on education. Fifty-five years have gone by but India has not managed to spend more than 4.5% of its GDP on education ever. Education holds less priority for successive governments of India. A proportionate 30% increase in the education budget is likely to improve the education scenario for India. However, money is not the only factor thwarting the Indian education system.

            The Indian education system does not encourage shared problem solving within the classroom. Learning from peers is not actively encouraged. In Nil Battey Sannata, Chanda and later Apeksha learn mathematics less from the school teacher and more from one of the other students in class 10 who works as a car-mechanic after school-hours. However, both Chanda and Apeksha have to learn from this boy outside the classroom. Taking help from him within the classroom while doing assignments would be considered cheating. Peer learning is actively discouraged within the classroom in Indian education. Group learning is unknown. Group discussion is a fancy keyword for rote assessment where one-upmanship is appreciated rather than the idea of learning together. In Dhh, peer learning also takes place not only outside the classroom but also outside the school premises. The school premises functions more as an examination centre. The actual learning takes place in the students’ individual houses and sometimes the students practise learning together on the rooftop of one of the students’ houses. The inhospitality of the Indian education system to peer learning is indicated in both the movies.

            Neither of these two movies gets a scope to highlight how the matter the students learn in school is utilised by the students. Relating the content to their lives is one of the ways in which interest in education is sustained and students motivate themselves. The movies shed no light on this as the students motivate themselves based on their idea of passing examinations rather than learning the matter. Since each student relates to some or other portion of the matter in his or her own way, the education system requires active participation from students so that other students, the teachers and most importantly a student realises how the matter is important to the him or her. In order to facilitate this, there is need for active discussion among the class. Class sizes need to be small and the teacher-student ratio needs to be small to make this work in practice. Money goes a long way in solving this problem.             Instead of frequent formal assessment and other rote work, more time should be left for the actual learning. Frequent formal assessment, rather than measuring whether students are keeping pace with the pedagogical system, ensures that the focus of the system is on these assessments rather than focussing on the matter and on other forms of learning together and mental development.

            These are some of the ways in which one may analyse the depiction of overcoming school educational challenges among weak students in these two movies.

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[1] Educational Statistics at a Glance (2018), https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/statistics-new/ESAG-2018.pdf. Accessed 9 January 2021.

[2] Ibid., pp. 49-52.

[3] Some surveys have been conducted in this area. See Arun N.R. Kishore and K.S. Shaji, ‘School Dropouts: Examining the Space of Reasons,’ Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine 34(4) (2012), pp. 318-323, https://dx.doi.org/10.4103%2F0253-7176.108201 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662127. Accessed 9 January 2021.

[4] ‘Cops “study” dropouts to curb crime,’ The Times of India, New Delhi edition, 16 November 2016, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Cops-study-dropouts-to-curb-crime/articleshow/55447728.cms. Accessed 9 January 2021.

[5] For example, see ‘Over 93,000 candidates, including 3,700 PhD holders apply for peon job in UP,’ Economic Times, 30 August 2018, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/over-93000-candidates-including-3700-phd-holders-apply-for-peon-job-in-up/articleshow/65604396.cms. Accessed 9 January 2021.

Technotopia and planning way ahead of the future

Australian Broadcasting Corporation Future Tense podcast, Artificial Cities, January 2021