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Friday March 29, 2024

The academic rat race

By Kamila Hyat
August 18, 2016

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.

When examination results come to have so much meaning in lives that they override all else, when any result short of a string of A*s – the highest attainable grade for ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels – is seen by students and parents as a failure and when teens and even much younger children attend multiple tuitions a day, it seems obvious things have gone very wrong.

With the results of examinations conducted by overseas syndicates coming in recently, it is quite obvious this is the case. Of course we are at a global level not alone in this; the same desperate rat race continues almost everywhere, but we do need to consider what it means. In so many ways this is important to our society.

In an excellent address delivered to parents, teachers and students in New Delhi this year, Indian actor Aamir Khan raised some pertinent questions. He asked if grades and positions should be considered more important than developing qualities such as empathy, kindness or promoting learning in the real sense of the word.

He asked why competitiveness was encouraged even at kindergarten level, but the child rarely, if ever, asked if he or she had spent a happy day, if they had made others happy. The actor raised questions too about the value of degrees, what they really showed and if they really measured success.

The questions may initially seem ludicrous. In the world we live in academic success of course opens up doors. But we need to examine things with a wider vision. Wouldn’t our community, our country, our world, be a better place if we raised kinder children with more empathy? Doesn’t competiveness at all costs also inculcate selfishness? And how can we escape this trap.

The problem of course lies at all tiers of education. There is perhaps too little recognition that an educational system that develops wider skills and traits is immensely important.

One of these traits is honesty. Blind competitiveness seems to encourage dishonesty and a lack of ethics. Certainly we suffer badly from this. Examination centres surrounded by police, as has become the norm for locally administered exams, should really not be acceptable. Even foreign exams now involve tighter and tighter security measures, and the use of unethical methods are rampant.

We see them all around us, at schools, at universities, at sporting competitions. Yet we do not react. By failing to do so we are passing on a distinct and blatantly dangerous message to our children. We are telling them only the end result matters, only the numbers put down on a piece of paper, rather than how they were attained. The issue of what real learning was acquired does not arise.

This goes beyond the issue of cheating or nepotism, both of which we are familiar with. Learning should not just be about acquiring grades. It should encompass much more than that, including an awareness about community and perhaps most importantly of all, the ability to think rationally and critically. That we have removed this faculty from our educational curriculums is perhaps one of the reasons people so often accept almost everything that is posted on social media at face value without questioning it, researching it or thinking sensibly about the truth behind it. Education, in the end, has a bearing on day to day life – but this is not simply based on the degrees that may be framed and pasted up against a wall or kept in a guarded folder.

The quest that has been developed locally for results at all costs, for the A* which seem to be the only concern of teachers, parents and students alike, has had all kinds of consequences. One is a loss of balance in the lives of children and young people. The results they strive for can be acquired by essentially memorising large portions of material and acquiring the skills necessary to regurgitate it in the necessary format.

Schools and tuition centres everywhere have mastered this art. They then, without scruple, advertise their ‘high achieving’ results, even though their pupils may not be able to write a simple essay based on anything outside their immediate course material or display the essential human skills which constitute the basis of social interactions.

It is, after all, our educational system which has produced a growing lack of ethics and honesty in all walks of life. This is hardly surprising when so little about the system is ethical in itself, ranging from the fees charged to parents, the advertising campaigns used, the underhand tactics employed to attract students and other claims made in published material which in many cases turn out to be exaggerated or falsified. Perhaps this then is the reason that schools and colleges are unable to impart the essential qualities of integrity to their students.

At least 70 percent of young persons, according to a survey conducted two years ago, stated they would cheat if they thought they would not be caught and that it would bring them a higher grade. There is reason to suspect a significant number of their parents would condone this decision rather than condemn it. The change in values and views that some political parties talk about has to begin at our schools.

It is important to remember it is not impossible to have a society which is essentially able to operate within the boundaries of integrity. It just comes as a surprise to us, because of the culture we have created, that such places exist. But even more central to the whole question is the manner in which education has become a marketable commodity. The main tool to sell it is the promise of high grades.

Tuition centres earn millions on the basis of the same promise. But in the process, what is forgotten is the question of whether we are producing students capable of displaying traits which make them better people, and whether they possess generosity, honesty and a wider view of the world which can act as a means to combat the stultified thinking which has locked us into an enclosed pen.

Even the best schools often do not encourage thinking outside these boundaries. After all, this is not essential to obtain the grades that seem to be their only raison d’être for schools. Parents search out those who can use well-mastered tools to generate results, regardless of what exam is being taken.

This is the simpler task. It is far harder to bring forward thought among children, far harder to remember that grades do not always matter, and that a happier child, a child who is allowed to discover his or her potential in his or her chosen field, may go on to achieve a greater degree of success than one forced into the traditional careers which, in our society, mark success and with it, generally, money.

The ideas about quite what kind of generation we are attempting to create for the future need to be thought about a little harder. Parents, educators, government policymakers and, yes, students themselves all need to combine forces for this and understand better that a letter or number inscribed on a piece of paper does not accurately define who they are, what they are capable of or what they can achieve in the future.

Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com