Leaps of Logic

Amritanshu
The author shares his first hand experience of having studied in IB as well as CBSE system and their implications in his higher studies, spotlighting certain points which may help educational policy makers.
I have had the special and somewhat unique pleasure of experiencing both Indian as well as Canadian systems of education. I passed out of 10th grade through the C.B.S.E. system but my 11th and 12th grades were completed under the International Baccalaureate (I.B.) . Under the I.B., I was not asked to choose a stream like science, commerce or arts. It was often an annoying experience having to explain to people my subjects (English, Hindi, Physics, Economics, Maths, Computer Science) when all they expected to hear was something like the usual combination of “PCM.”
This came as a relief to me as personally I wanted to study history while most of my family and friends were advising me to pick science. The I.B. gives students six core groups of subjects, out of which they must choose one each. The first two groups are language groups. Out of the two languages English at a certain level is compulsory and the second language is of the student’s choice. One group is the Humanities group- History, Economics, Geography, Psychology, etc. while another group is the Science group- Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Mathematics is compulsory as the fifth group while the student is free to pick any subject (out of those offered) for the sixth group.
Apart from these six groups, the I.B. also required that I complete, in the course of two years, an intensive research essay on a topic of my choice of about four thousand words. I was also given weekly courses in ‘Theory of Knowledge’ which dealt with how humans acquired knowledge and perceived facts or phenomena. Where I.B. outweighed C.B.S.E., to me was its steadfast refusal to ask students to make a choice of streams right after their tenth grade. Not having to make that choice and the freedom to study a wide variety of courses was the best thing for all of us who came to I.B. from C.B.S.E. and I.C.S.E. backgrounds.
Another feature of I.B. has now been so often quoted that it has almost become an overused cliché but the fact remains that I.B. was never rote-based. People are surprised to hear this but in the calculation based papers of I.B., like math or physics, we were given formulae sheets carrying all the important formulae during our examinations. Many wonder that if we were given the formulae sheet then how did we not score a hundred percent every time. This to me is an illustration of C.B.S.E. conditioning where questions never tested one’s application of understanding, simply the talent of memorization. We were even allowed to use calculators, and not the simple ones but complex graphing calculators. Enter seven values of ‘x’ into these calculators and they would spit out the mean, median, mode, standard deviation, variance, etc. in a matter of seconds.
But the calculator point brings me the first of the cons of the I.B. as I saw it. The foreign students in my class, especially those from U.S.A. or Canada were highly dependent on their calculators. We on the other hand were used to calculations both mental and written. For even simple calculations like 15 + 21 they would use the calculators while we could do them mentally. Our C.B.S.E. (or I.C.S.E.) education had developed a reasonable calculation skill within us which gave us an upper hand in terms of speed of problem solving as well as the confidence with which we approached the problems.
Another con was the fact the freedom of I.B. spoiled many of us. By the time we passed out of 12th standard, my friends who had done 12th under C.B.S.E. or I.C.S.E. were more or less certain of what they were to do in life and what courses lay ahead of them. I, on the other hand, had no clue. I knew what my interests were and could wax eloquently about the freedom I had experienced by not having to choose a stream. But I was woefully ignorant when it came to career opportunities and Bachelors’ options. I went off to Canada with the intention of doing a B.B.A., shifted halfway to a B.Sc. in astrophysics and returned soon after to India to pursue a B.A. Honors in economics. A friend of mine from my I.B. days went off to Germany intending to learn Biotechnology but around the time I shifted to Astrophysics he shifted to Geophysics. He is now completing his degree in environmental Economics !
This brings me to the second phase of my experience with Indian and Western education. After completing 12th grade I succeeded in gaining admission into one of the well known universities in Canada. This experience was a different one altogether. For one, attendance in classes was not compulsory. There was no daily ritual of calling out names followed by “present sir!” The theory was that since you were paying the university fees by not attending classes you were wasting your own money. However, the university had a complex and well maintained academic network. Each professor put up his or her class notes onto the network after every class. The weekly or monthly tests were often held online, albeit with a time limit and we could take them from our own bedrooms. The university’s library facilities were equally ‘21st century.’ All students were given ‘One-card’ that were the university’s own debit cards. We could charge the one-cards with the amount of money of our choice and this was stored in the magnetic strip of the one-card. The libraries possessed a number of all-in-one printer-scanner-photocopiers that were connected to the computer network. Sit on a computer, find something you want to print, send the command, swipe your one-card, and get it printed; the printing charge would be deducted from your one-card. I must admit it was not as much fun actually studying the notes as it was going to the library and getting them printed out.
In my current university, here in Delhi, on the other hand, there are four photocopy booths spread across the campus. All of them are subject to the availability of electricity. From 12:30 to 2:30 they are all closed because the men manning them are off to lunch and they close by 5:30. If you want something photocopied, you must be ready to stand there with other students (there is never a queue) and nag them till it is done, for if you leave it to them and trust that in four or five hours it will be done, you are quite mistaken. The computer network is often down for some reason or the other, and there are only two computers on which you can search whether the library possesses the book you want or not. Assuming that it does hold that particular book, if you do find it, it will very likely be coated with a layer of dust that gets into your nose and soils your hands and bag. In the University of Alberta, the professors were available almost 24X7 through email, and they had fixed office hours during which we could approach them. Here there are no office hours; it depends on pure chance and timing. The scholarly and intellectual vibes that you would unmistakably feel in the University of Alberta are conspicuous here only by their absence.
I could talk about other things as well, like the fact that how well I score in my exams depends on how many sheets I can fill within three hours or that how there is no board or union where the students can address their problems or the sorry and smelly state of the washrooms; or the hygiene, or lack of it, in the canteens but these are minor issues and I do not mean to disrepute the entire Indian university system on the basis of my experience with two universities, one Canadian and one Indian. What I do notice here is the absence of that ‘x-factor’. The x-factor contains that atmosphere and spirit that enables students to get down and concentrate on their academics rather than being caught up in various grievances and complaints about “the system.” The x-factor contains the enabling of those services and facilities that aid the student in furthering his understanding of the subject of study. It contains the easy availability of the knowledge-imparters to follow up the doubts of the students. In most Indian universities, unfortunately, the x-factor is absent.
So then is it safe to say that the Western system is better than the Indian system? Does the later have nothing to take home? This I cannot say yes to. The answer lies, as it often does in a steady balance of both. The Indian system prepares the student for the essential requirements of hard-work, concentration and dedicated approach. The Western system contains perhaps equally essential requirements of atmosphere enabling and intellectual freedom that are so required in the holistic development of an individual. In my school where I studied under the I.B. curriculum, I knew more about heat and energy than my foreign classmates but they knew more about the working of cars or the dispute between Israel and Palestine, etc. Somewhere between these two extremes is a balance that must be struck. It is as Anurag Mathur, the novelist, writes in his novel- The Inscrutable Americans. The novel explores the experiences of Gopal, a student from a small town in India who goes to an American university:
“For the first time he began to learn the joy of analysis rather than retention. Based upon the core of fundamentals that had been hammered into him- quite often literally- he experimented with leaps of logic. Often he paused uncertainly as though in mid-air, waiting for someone to admonish him and demand that he return to thinking by the book. For the first time in his life he gloried in studying.”
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