‘Indian student works hard, but isn’t prepared for jobs’

People would ask me often last year, “How do Indian students compare with American students?” eyeing me carefully as I wracked my brain to formulate an adequate answer.

I was an English teacher at Kadod High School, sent by the Nanubhai Education Foundation whose mission is to improve English language and technical skills of students living in rural India so that they will have access to the growing Indian economy.

To these questions, I would often reply as truthfully as I could: Indian students work harder, care more and are far more respectful of teachers and education than any American student I’ve ever encountered.

“But what about intelligence and IQ?” the curious inquirer would push on. Here I would pause. They are just kids, I’d think, and products of the education system in which they are taught. This idea of intelligence has different meanings across different cultural contexts.  Often teachers would tell me casually that this or that class I was teaching was “smart” or “as dumb as buffaloes”.

In India, intelligence seems to be measured by ability to score well on the state-administered exams that the students must take. It is an attitude that stretches to parents as well. When I visited homes, parents would proudly parade their children in front of me to recite their ABCs, bursting with pride as they told me the percentage that their child received. When I’d inquire about the shy child hiding just behind the doorway, they’d dismissively look away and say, “This child is the smart one. She,” indicating the child in the doorway, “is not talented at school.”

This exam-driven environment often affected the reality of my classroom in our rural public school. I discovered that essay writing meant copying an essay out of a cheap, privately-published exam preparation book, often littered with grammatical errors, onto the black board, asking students to copy it dutifully into their notebooks and memorise it so that it can be regurgitated on the exam. I discovered that this “writing instruction” persists not only in English subject, but in all language subjects — Gujarati and Hindi are the same.

At junctures like these, I found myself questioning my colleagues in much the same way they questioned me: “But how will the students learn to write?” I’d ask, confused. The reply that I got inevitably sounded like this: “But they will do well on the exam. And the exam is graded very harshly. Also how can we afford to teach them to write when there is so little time to cover the curriculum?”

“How can you afford not to?” I would think to myself. I’d try to imagine what jobs these students, unable to write, would be fit for after they graduated. Journalism? No. Corporate Business? No. Research? No. Even IT requires the ability to write cohesively and fluidly as a soft skill that helps advance your career. How were we setting children up for success after exams and percentages would be long gone and they’d have to face the real world? How were we making the students employable?

I also found that my students did not have much perspective on what they needed to be employable in the growing Indian job market. How could they when all they knew was that being first ranked in the exam, which prizes the ability to memorise over the ability to think critically or solve problems, was the most important thing? Understandably, percentages helped students distinguish themselves in applying in an overcrowded job market- but what would help them keep that employment, advance their career and actually be good at the work they would be doing?

Over the course of the year, I found myself questioning the structures that surrounded my students often — why did they copy their homework out of exam guides? Why did they copy drawings from handkerchiefs and notebook covers when I asked them to make something original? Why did the exam ask students to memorise poetry rather than to analyse it? Why were the teachers, who I enjoyed working with so much, not given more opportunities to attend conferences and seminars to become better?

The answers to all of these questions were layer upon layer of cultural complexity, of course; which is why, when people would ask me, “Who are smarter? Americans or Indians?” — I’d simply reply: “It’s just different.”