Interview taken by Payal
Former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and Founder of LMP Education Trust, Prof M M Pant, who has been exploring independently the new trends in education, technology, pedagogy, speaks about how education has been changing eventually as time has been progressing.
Q) Can you share your views in the changes you see in the education sector from your time till these days?
A) Education is not the same everywhere. It differs from an institute, university, town, it varies with different times. To put education as one is not right.
Sharing a story about Albert Einstein – he was a professor of Physics at the Institute of Advance Study in Princeton University. In those days, there were neither any computers nor laser printers to perform any kind of task, so Einstein prepares a question paper by hand, gives it to a teaching assistant and tell to circulate among all the students. When the teaching assistant looks at the question paper, he gets shocked and tells Einstein that these are the same questions which were given to same set of students last year. To that, Einstein says, “You are right. The questions are same, but the answers have changed.”
This is what is happening to education today. The questions are the same- what do we teach, how do we teach, where do we teach, how do we access, what is the relevance? The answers are different. All of us have to change our game. Even subjects have differed from the previous ones. When I was small, people who were important were those who knew philosophy, politics, literature, Bacon, Shakespeare and many others. By the time I grew, Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics became more important. Recently the trend has become Information technology (IT). This way, subjects have been changing and so does the method of teaching change.
Q) These days, students are bearing lot of academic pressure. What practices can you suggest?
A) Students are bearing academic pressure, because the whole approach is wrong. They are trying to adopt the old kind of memorizing, when this concept is no longer important. Education has its roots in memorizing because there was a time when there were no books, no photocopying or no question of any electronic media. The only thing one could do was to memorise something, because he/she is in a university want to memorise everything taught by brilliant teachers, where knowledge has no boundaries. I belong to that generation. I can still tell out an equation even today, because I couldn’t go to a class, even with a paper in my hand for the formulas. So I had to memorise all the formulas. Today’s scenario is not the same. When I pose a question, the student can give an immediate answer in no time. What do we do with the knowledge we have is more important, than just reproducing the knowledge entirely.
The tension students are bearing is because they are trying to memorise everything, which is not necessary. They only need to understand the concept. If one talks to a good physicist, he’ll say I do not remember all the formulas and equations, I know the principles and I use them to apply wherever they are. I have the skill to derive the formula if I need it. So the point is that when people are stressed, that is because they are doing a wrong thing. Stress happens (physical, emotional, mental or financial) when you have to do more than what you have to. For example, if you don’t have money and you have to spend, then it is financial stress.
