Education and making the human

File pic from 2016

There was an extract from young Albert Einstein’s biography by Patrick Pringle in CBSE’s class eleven English. It showed Albert questioning his history teacher on why anyone should bother to memorise dates in history. Education shouldn’t be about memorising facts, Einstein told his teacher, it should be about generating ideas and nurturing students’ creativity.

The lesson was removed from the syllabus from the 2025-26 academic session. We can easily understand why. A student questioning his teacher and the system is not the Indian way. Fear of authority, blind obedience, and rote learning are the hallmarks of Indian education, especially in the last decade.

Seventy years ago, American educator and psychologist Benjamin Bloom, proposed a revolutionary change in the education system. He wanted schools to nurture all the three domains of a student’s mind: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. The theory was taught in India’s teacher training institutions for decades, later with the modifications added by Anderson & Krathwohl in 2001. But India’s National Education Policy 2020 centralises education to suit a particular ideology and subdues the noble objectives envisioned by great educators.

Knowledge acquisition is the most elementary goal in Bloom’s vision. Knowing facts. This is what Albert Einstein questioned. When did the First War of Independence take place? What is the chemical composition of water? Who wrote the Ramayana?

Of course, there are more complex questions in higher classes. But they too test the student’s memory mostly. Memory-based knowledge is the most elementary thing that a school can provide. The school should help students to move forward towards comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

India’s present assessments approach application levels at best. That’s just halfway in Bloom’s plan. Do we ever find an analytical question like this in a physics exam?

Question:
Two students argue about seat belts.

• Student A says: “Seat belts save lives because they stop the body instantly during a crash.”
• Student B says: “Seat belts save lives because they increase the time taken to stop.”

Analyse both statements using Newton’s laws and decide which reasoning is scientifically sound and why.

A student must be taught to go beyond analysis too: to synthesis, evaluation (judging, justifying a position), and creation (designing something new).

An example for evaluation question:

State neutrality towards religion is sufficient to ensure secularism. Evaluate this claim with reference to the Indian model of secularism. Should the state go beyond neutrality? Give reasons.

Evaluation questions move beyond textbook definitions. They demand ethical and constitutional judgement in subjects like political science and literature. Moreover, multiple defensible positions are accepted and independent, diverse thinking is encouraged.

A lot of changes have been introduced in the assessment, no doubt. Are they effective? Do teachers and students understand the objectives of the assessment patterns? Are teachers comfortable with ambiguity, can they accept multiple valid answers? A teacher who fears losing control cannot nurture critical thinkers. Most importantly, does the board of education or the government have ulterior motives?

I have only dealt with the cognitive domain above. While the cognitive domain asks “Do you know?” the affective asks “Do you value?” My good friend Jose D Maliekal raised this question in his comment to my last post: Does our education system “make the human”?

Making humans, excellent ones at that, is the ultimate objective envisioned by Bloom in the affective domain.

Can we dare to give questions like: Is Rama’s obedience an ethical ideal or a tragic loss of selfhood?

The Enemy by Pearl S Buck is one of the best short stories in CBSE’s class 12 English. Do we find questions like:

Dr. Sadao knows that helping the wounded American soldier may brand him a traitor in wartime Japan. Yet he chooses to save the man’s life.

As a reader, evaluate Dr. Sadao’s decision by reflecting on this conflict:

• duty to one’s nation
• duty to one’s profession
• duty to humanity

Which of these do you believe should take precedence in extreme situations like war, and why?

Students must examine their own values, not recall the plot. There is no single correct answer. Ethical reflection rather than moralizing is encouraged. A student is trained to develop a personal value system by giving such questions.

This is a tough job for teachers. Whenever I tried asking questions like: After reading The Enemy, has your understanding of the word enemy changed? Explain how – I received textbook answers, predictable, conventional thinking. Our students are not encouraged to think for themselves!

Perhaps the ultimate line of the education of the affective domain is: If students leave school knowing what is right but afraid to stand for it, affective education has failed.

The third domain is the psychomotor. This does get a fair deal of attention in our schools with the practical classes in the labs, games and other activities outdoors, etc. Again, care needs to be taken to ensure that labs don’t become rituals, PT doesn’t turn into punishment, and arts don’t end up as decorations. India is yet to learn to equip students with worthwhile skills that can find them jobs if needed.

To sum up, school education should move from the basic objectives of memorising and reproducing facts to the higher objectives. The ultimate objective is to make the human.