Bleed Skholē With a Thousand Cuts

A critique of Indian STEM education

The etymology geeks would know that skholē is an ancient Greek word used for a place of philosophical discussion and leisure that eventually became today’s “school”. However, in that sense, skholḗ is already dead, but we are killing the very idea that skholḗ carried for academia with a thousand cuts.

Prologue #

I recently graduated from school after 15 years of total school education in the Indian K-12 system. With all the positive aspects of education, I have a few very critical arguments against some of the methods and choices of the Indian education system(1) (1)Several things I say here might be true for other countries, but I cannot claim certitude. . While there might be some crucial problems in the Indian system concerning infrastructure and quality of instruction, I will not be covering those aspects because I completed all my 15 years of education in a school which might be one of the few top CBSE-affiliated schools in India. I have seldom faced any issues with regard to the quality of instruction or school infrastructure when I take a relativistic point-of-view with the rest of India.

My complaints with regards to education will be something that must concern the respective authorities from education boards and government bodies like CBSE, and not poor execution of regulations in individual schools i.e., they will be focused a lot on academics, examinations and syllabi. Thus, all matters here will be valid even when considering a perfectly ideal school that follows every CBSE (or whatever state board) norm and has highly qualified teachers.⊕ I am writing this critique as a future engineer who wants to talk about the problems of the schooling system that hinder the creation of better engineers. Forgive me for the lengthy text, for I just have a lot to say. Due to the lack of experience and motivation, I will also tend to exclude a lot of criticism from areas other than STEM and science academia.

Another vital thing that I would like to clarify in the beginning is that I am a well-wisher and an optimist for education. A lot of people tend to blame external systems and entities for their failures. Even though I scored 85.4% in my final 12th grade board exams, I am not writing this as a form of frustration towards my failures in my studies. I have well understood my flaws, so I do not blame any other person or institution for things that I have done erroneously.

The Death of Curiosity #

My driving force for exploration and learning has always been curiosity. In fact, in our culture, by definition, a student is someone curious to know. I seemed to be a little bizarre to my peers for paying too much attention to some topics discussed in class, with a will to go to great lengths to either prove my point to the teacher, or to spend several hours trying to understand something that interests me, even though it is not a part of the syllabus. Although I don’t have any formal assessment to prove this, I would like to argue that out of a toolset of important stuff like memorization, curiosity, IQ (whatever that might be), accuracy, etc., I have only two strong superpowers, curiosity, and the ability to understand things better than everyone else. There is no such thing I can’t understand if I am curious about it. Even though I have a lot of friends with impeccable memory, and outstanding accuracy in problem-solving, I don’t think I have found anyone who is as curious or can understand novel stuff thrown to them as quickly as I can.

The crisis with the school curriculum is that it dissuades curiosity and the ability to understand a concept from its grassroots. One of the most outrageous things for me is when a pupil or a peer refuses to explore a subject or concept with me. The attitude that “I will not learn unless asked in an exam” is unintentionally promoted by the school curriculum by asking a limited set of questions from a limited set of concepts covered in textbooks. For example, when I was learning single variable calculus from MIT OCW, I was astounded by how much attention was paid to every detail and derivation of common differentiation formulas. One of the questions in the exam was

State the product rule for the derivative of a pair of differentiable functions f and g using your favourite notation. Then use the DEFINITION of the derivative to prove the product rule. Briefly justify your reasoning at each step.

I was stupefied for our exams never ask these kinds of questions. Often, the textbook lays down certain formulae as magic followed by exercises which use them to form several questions where the magical formula needs to be applied mindlessly.

To their defence, NCERT has also provided formal proofs and derivations for several magical formulae, but then again, if the tests don’t ask them, nobody will read them. However, this does not mean I want NCERT to publish derivations and CBSE to ask them as 5-mark questions. Because if that were the case, students would mug up every step of those proofs and write them down in exams mindlessly. The issue we are trying to fight here is the “mindlessness” part of things.

A brave thing to do is ask some open-ended questions in exams that cannot be mugged up from NCERT or any other source and require an inquisitive attitude to problem-solving. We want questions that appreciate the reasoning of students rather than the result. In the end, an engineer is more concerned with reasoning, while the result comes with the help of machines, SOPs and documentation. The government bodies use several new policies to their defence for this argument, but those policies mean nothing if there is no incentive for the students to get out of their comfort zone of mindlessness. Until each student is required to be good at reasoning and imagination to pass an exam, all those curriculum changes don’t influence anything. The only incentive students have in the current system is that of test scores. Either you can pivot the incentive to other methods of assessment, or make it such that the current incentive i.e., test scores, requires curiosity and imagination as an inherent necessity.

One solution that I would suggest is making the exams as unanticipated as possible. No fixed marking schemes, no fixed set of preparation material, and no fixed question format. As long as the exams are predictable, there will always be coaching institutions and schools that curb reasoning and curiosity to trade with test scores through memorization and mindless application of a direct pattern of questions. An exam should be such that there is no way to prepare for it. Assessment should not be the goal of learning but just a gauge of learning. The current system facilitates assessment as the final goal, and learning just as a means to do so. Instead, learning must be the goal, and unpredictable assessment as the gauge for learning, so there is no way to directly prepare for it.

Whilst teaching, there should be no consideration for either the student or the teacher on the weightage of that concept on the next test, or the question pattern of an exam. Your priority is being the best at what is taught, not figuring out how the tests will be conducted, while simultaneously being curious enough to investigate by yourself. This should be the only way to score well on tests, not through preparation for the test itself.

No student is free to ask interesting questions so long as they are incentivised to solve a particular pattern of pre-defined questions for a specific exam. Institutions simply beat around the bush by saying “We encourage students to ask questions.” or “We ask the students to perform certain activities.”, though the naked truth is that all these things are bluffs that are used as cloaks for an underlying rat race. As long as the rat race is the goal, none of the gimmicks will work. The entire assessment structure requires an overhaul such that it no longer remains the goal of learning. Any institution(2) (2)This is my retort to CBSE and the IITs. that uses these phrases to justify its stupid educational policies is either wickedly hypocritical or straight-up idiotic and stupid.

If I ask a science student why they are learning a certain concept on any random page of the textbook and they say “Because it carries 8 marks in the final exam” instead of “Because it is interesting” or “Because I was curious to know”, you have failed and you should be mortified because you butchered the student’s curiosity as of that moment.⊕ The solution I have proposed is to not know how many marks it carries, whether it carries any at all. They can’t even know if they will be asked a numerical, a derivation, or an open-ended question that is not mentioned on the page itself. You made them believe that those 8 marks were the causation of knowledge written on a page and not the other way around.

Too Much Abstraction #

Another thing that I have always hated is when I asked a certain question and was told “You will learn this after so-and-so years”. The current curriculum relies too much on magic, as I have stated previously. There are too many instances in syllabi that don’t have enough pedagogical clarity as to why something is the way it is, and why it is relevant. I am not demanding a complete theoretical and practical justification of the stated facts, even basic intuition is enough to please a student’s curiosity(3) (3)For example, I had always been curious about what terms like sine, cosine etc. meant on the calculator as a kid. Whenever I asked this, the usual answer was that they would be taught in high school, but if someone had made the effort to draw a right-angled triangle and said that the ratio of these two sides is called the sine of this angle, that would be adequate for me. .

Even after being taught, what is deemed “advanced” math for JEE, certain things were still laid out without proper background and justification. Sometimes I enjoy reading NCERT text that examines why something is true, and why it is important. Again, those things are not covered in lectures because although NCERT has them, they are never asked in any exam. Why talk about something that’s undoubtedly not going to be asked in an exam?

Grant Sanderson from 3Blue1Brown does an exceptional job of explaining the origins and the derivations of certain ideas. He has stated in one of his videos that the goal of these lectures is to make the learners walk on the path of the mathematicians who would have come up with these ideas, such that the facts that they are learning seem so apparent to them, that they would have come up with. It is because of this, that all his lectures seem so refreshing and educating. It feels like a magician revealing his tricks to the audience. This is also the reason a lot of the comments on his videos say “I wish they taught me this way in college or high school”. The general rule of thumb is that learning a new concept should feel like a revelation, or a conquest, not some odd prophecy that is handed down by gods without proper context.

But There’s a Catch #

Conversely, this is somewhat the opposite of what engineers generally do. Engineers rely on black box abstraction where certain procedures are considered as a black box that takes an input and gives an output, and the internal mechanism is often ignored for the sake of solving a larger problem at hand. However, we are discussing about future engineers here. We have to supervise two factors whenever we consider teaching or learning new concepts: motivation, and hard work. The point I am going to make here is that they are not independent parameters, and motivation can control the work. Hard work is only hard when a person doesn’t have the right motivation(4) (4)Notice that I am not talking about the amount of motivation, but just the right motivation. .

Now this might be a little subjective, but I believe that even saying “I want to pass cutoff scores for so-and-so institute” or “I want to get placed with so-and-so salary” isn’t the right kind of motivation. The basic criterion for motivation to be considered right is that when you have it, any amount of work you do becomes fun. By fun, I don’t mean in a masochistic sense, which is often the case for the motivations I just cited. With these motivations, people often get the feeling of pleasure in doing hard work by hallucinating the success they were aiming for, i.e., being admitted to a top institute or being rich after getting the salary they desired. They are not having fun in doing the hard work but thinking of having fun when the hard work is done, while the function of doing the work itself might be somewhat pain-inducing.

To talk about the right kind of motivation, I should give an example of myself when I was learning to code. I was not following some course or textbook for the same, I was literally on my own and mostly relied on Google searches and sparse pieces of really great advice from some internet personalities. This is akin to someone stranded on an island with a broken boat and an eternity to spend learning how to fix it without proper resources. I was trying to fix, or rather upgrade some open source discord bot without having any knowledge about it at all. I learned to program while fiddling with that code to get my desired features working. However, if you think about it, the process was supposed to be quite painful, after all, I had zero idea of what I was doing and had a codebase of over 3000 lines in front of me to fix. But the motivation I had was that if I figured out what this bit of code does, I might be able to add the XYZ feature to the bot⊕ The end goal was to make the bot one of the best bots available for public use, and gain user-base, but that was not what I had in mind when trying to code. . Often the reward of such a micro-goal was quite gratifying, as I learned inheritance (in OOP) along with implementing a certain new feature of the bot. The actual process of doing this was fun, not just the result.

I believe that you do not require big aspirations to have the right motivation. I am not refuting that your end goal shouldn’t be career-oriented. I have a good analogy for you to get an idea of what I mean by the right motivation. Imagine you love aeroplanes. You have been searching about various aviation companies, their aeroplanes and their features as a hobby. Maybe your end goal is as grand as building one yourself or flying one on your own, but that’s not certain at this point. One day, you get the chance to visit the cockpit to learn everything inside. Now, if you start taking this very seriously as if your life depends on knowing what every single button does and if you forget anything, you lose your chance of ever becoming a pilot, then the very same cockpit you were fascinated about will become a stressful nightmare. However, if you look at this opportunity flippantly, then you will be thrilled about getting to know the cockpit from the inside finally after so many years of merely dreaming about it. This applies to engineering as well. If as a child, you were fascinated with machines and always wondered how nature works and how we trick nature to work for us, when you get the opportunity to learn about it, it will become a thrilling experience. However, if you look at this as a do-or-die situation where you won’t be able to become a successful engineer if you fail to remember any formula or theorem, then this same fascination will become a stressful nightmare. Hence, if you are captivated about knowing something and when you finally get to know it, you will have the right kind of motivation. In fact, in this case, you will have enough motivation that any amount of effort you make won’t seem difficult at all. Hard work won’t seem to be as hard as you thought.

Why Does It Matter #

All this talk on motivation in a section about abstraction. The reason I am discussing this is because the black box abstraction will destroy the motivation I just talked about. Imagine if the pilot or instructor who took you to the cockpit said “You don’t need to know why this is the way it is right now, just know that it does a certain action” to almost every question you ask them, then you will be disgruntled and dispirited to learn any further. This happened to me when I used to follow programming tutorials and they said “Ignore this bit of code, for now just think that it does XYZ” I used to hate that so much that often if it happened enough times, I would quit following that tutorial entirely. A good mentor is someone who always tries his best to provide good intuition in response to pupils’ questions. I remember the day when I saw the video “Fun to Imagine” with Richard Feynman and how elated I was to learn about the jiggling atoms’ explanation for so many things.

The derivatives of the sine and cosine functions were simply handed down to us in school as something to remember for future application. However, both 3Blue1Brown and MIT OCW lectures by Prof. David Jerison provide a very good graphical intuition for why the derivatives are such.

Garbage Information Tactic for Assessments #

I have been accused of hating chemistry as a part of a STEM subject. I partly agree that I love math and computer science, followed by physics and I dislike chemistry as it is taught right now. However, I would like to add a bit of nuance to this. I don’t hate chemistry as a subject, but I hate chemistry as it is taught right now. The way it is taught right now is as follows: Visit the Python Library Reference, you have 2 weeks to memorize all of its contents. After two weeks, the following questions are presented to you in an isolated exam hall with zero reference or support material whatsoever -

1. Write an expression that can be used to find out the population standard deviation of any list of numbers.
2. Differentiate between shutil.copystat() and shutil.copymode() functions based on their functionality.
3. The expression random.randint(a, b) will give a random integer N such that
   1. $a<N<b$
   2. $a\le N<b$
   3. $a\le N\le b$
   4. $a<N\le b$
   5. None of the above

Fellow software developers reading this will understand the problem I am trying to get to. Even a software engineer with 15+ years of experience will not be able to answer these accurately if they were asked these out of the blue. Even after trying to memorize the entire documentation, many of them will struggle with such particulars. They are not failed engineers, the problem lies in the nature of the questions themselves. A real engineer doesn’t care to memorize such intricate details from any documentation, because they are never restricted from referring to the documentation to begin with. If I took the last JEE or NEET chemistry questions and gave them to a chemical engineer, there is a minuscule chance that they score anywhere near the required cutoffs for students, because as a chemical engineer, they don’t ever have to worry about the stuff that’s been asked. There would broadly be two categories of questions on this basis. I suppose that a chemical engineer must be able to explain the mesomeric effect in carbon compounds at any point in his career, but I don’t think they will be required to know that in the laboratory, a manganese (II) ion salt is oxidised by peroxodisulphate to permanganate as per the following reaction

$$\ce{2Mn^2+ + 5S2O8^2- + 8H2O-> 2MnO4^- + 10SO4^2- + 16H^+}$$

because most of the time when it is the case, they will either be performing this reaction 15 times a week and remember it by experience, or will be given an SOP as an intern, that has all the details laid out in front of them. The first category of questions is so fundamental to their field of science that any person pursuing higher education should be aware of its basics and how things are derived from it, but the second category of questions are things that can be found in a piece of manual or documentation and have absolutely no reason to be memorized. I do appreciate the first category of questions, but the second category of questions is not a good measure of one’s competence in the subject, but rather memorization skills. The second type of question is what I would like to call a garbage information tactic used by the examining authorities. This tactic seems to be effective for filtering out people who are not serious about an exam, by awarding only those who made the effort to memorize things in great detail from the textbook. People who can memorize this stuff easily will find these types of questions favourable for scoring well easily. The reason I hate chemistry is because this is what studying chemistry feels like. It feels like trying to remember everything written in a piece of manual.

I would like to add a bit of caution along with this argument. This is one of those famous arguments used by many students to hate STEM content. You will know how many times ignorant students say “When am I ever going to use this?” as an excuse for not learning important things. For example, I once heard someone say

When will I ever be required to know the electric field due to a thin uniformly charged infinite plane sheet?

To a normal person, yes, this might seem like garbage information, but upon further inspection, one will understand that the process used for deriving this electric field is very fundamental to physics. We use Guass’ law to figure out the electric field. The kind of integrals we solve to find this can be seen several times in physics to derive various other stuff, and even Guass’ law itself is a very fundamental piece of knowledge, we must know how it is used in real life. Also, an infinite sheet is a good approximation for a normal-sized sheet when you need to figure out the electric field a few nanometers away. Essentially, I am trying to say that this is NOT garbage information. So, one must be cautious when trying to argue whether something is garbage or not.

In connection to my aforesaid point regarding caution, there is one special way you can turn useful concepts into garbage information by putting a very short time constraint in exams. For example, you can ask a student to derive the electric field due to a thin uniformly charged infinite plane sheet, and use that expression to solve some numerical in 5 minutes, or you could simply ask the student a numerical and give them 1 minute to answer it. In the latter case, when there is a short time constraint, and derivations aren’t a requirement, the obvious thing to do is to memorize 15 different formulae for electric fields due to different kinds of shapes and conductors, and simply plug the values in the formula which you remember. Congratulations, you have converted a useful concept into a garbage information tactic and made the students mug up formulae to apply them mindlessly, AGAIN. This issue is very personal to me because this was one of the major reasons I scored less in various exams. I have way too many instances of running out of time for questions where I don’t remember the required formula and waste time on deriving it, only to realise it is not worth the time and I should move on to the next question which might be simpler.

This tactic gives a false sense of proficiency in a subject in which you might not be competent. It is very easy to score well in chemistry because of this reason. You don’t need deep knowledge of chemistry to know what reagent is used in Gattermann Koch reaction. Whatever you need to know is given in the textbook, mug it up, score well in exams, and then forget it. This is a very redundant process, if it was done in a manner in which you can safely forget it after the next test, I don’t see why it was on the test in the first place. I don’t protest against the information provided in the textbook. It is good to know the reagent if you are interested in remembering it, but then why is everybody required to remember it for the test, if no one is required to remember it after the test? If they provided us with every single named reaction, the periodic table, certain obscure formulae and scientific calculator, and still managed to make the exam challenging, then I would call it a real assessment of the subject. You must have all the tools at your disposal, just like an engineer would, and then the only thing required from your end, is thinking. I don’t think chemical engineers remember 200 named reactions like cavemen because software engineers sure do not.

Epilogue #

I cannot reckon the number of times I have engaged in a mutual rant with a friend about the flaws of the system we are going through. After numerous years of learning to cope through the dissolution of aspirations and determination, aka maturing, it seems my friends should have finally conceded with undesired reality by accepting their fates within the system. The desire to create change finally seems like a childish longing, irrational enough to never conceive itself into reality at once. Thus, rendering this entire post as a useless effort turned to wasted time and energy. However, apart from the practical reasons to jot down these arguments, I still have clung to those childish longings to create any change, be it tiny enough to go neglected.

My scrutiny of schooling here revolves around the central idea of ideal STEM pedagogy which solves India’s technological problems and fixes the morale of aspiring scientists and engineers in academia. Whilst writing this, my outlook was that of an elated student excited about science and technology reviewing this system. Any arguments I might have missed can be deduced from entering this perspective. Although Indians find solace in hearing the shallow stories of poor rickshaw drivers becoming IITians and building successful careers, I am still seeking Nobel prize winners or industry pioneers. Sure, for the poor population of the country, achieving the best career opportunities from sheer competition is an exceptional reward at an individual level, but I might be from a minority of people who courageously challenge the fame that the so-called prestigious government institutions wield.