Studying is supposed to be one of the approaches to Learning. But has the tail started wagging the dog?

This hilarious scene in the famous movie 3 Idiots possibly best illustrates the gist of this blog post.

3 Idiots came more than a decade ago but it kind of illustrated some deep rooted practices that have crept in over the last few decades into our Learning pedagogies.

Wikipedia defines Learning as the process of process of acquiring new, or modifying existing, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences.[1] The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants. Humans learn before birth and continue until death as a consequence of ongoing interactions between people and their environment.

On the other hand, this is how Wikipedia defines “Study skills”

Study skills, academic skill, or study strategies are approaches applied to learning. They are generally critical to success in school, considered essential for acquiring good grades, and useful for learning throughout one’s life.

The definition of “Study skills” is indeed quite reflective of today’s status. Learning seems to come last after words like “Success”, “good grades” which is quite intriguing.

The Year was 1992. Seems like yesterday but it almost 3 decades ago. As I was studying for my High school board exams, the definition of success was to get into a good engineering school which in turn opened up a number of interesting possibilities. One of the subjects was Physics. The textbook had 20 chapters which covered several concepts starting from “Simple Pendulum” to “Light”, “Heat”, “Electricity”, “Magnetism” etc., As a general principle, the concepts mentioned in the topics got more complex as one progressed through the chapters and in several cases, the concepts articulated in the previous chapters were essential to understand the concepts of the later chapters. The education board where I studied was quite clear that there will not be any evaluation of application of the concepts that were taught. And how do I know this? The final exam which comprised of 150 marks had 10 questions of 15 marks each. However the question would have 20 questions (1 from each chapter) which would be put together as follows

Question 1

Question 1a: A question from Chapter 1 – 15 Marks

OR

Question 1b: A question from Chapter 2 – 15 Marks

Question 2

Question 2a: A question from Chapter 3 – 15 Marks

OR

Question 2b: A question from Chapter 4 – 15 Marks

….

Question 10

Question 10a: A question from Chapter 19 – 15 marks

OR

Question 10b: A question from Chapter 20 – 15 marks

Further, the board had made it clear the exam would only have theory questions and definitely no problems or any other application of the concepts. A few years prior to 1992, some wisecrack of a professor had made instituted changes to have a few problems but this was shoved down the door as the number of students who got 150/150 came down dramatically. As one would have detected by now, a person could get 150/150 by just studying 10 out of the 20 chapters. So the educational system was getting geared towards acquiring study skills and if by that, one gets to learn, it was welcome, however learning was only a side-effect. Further we were always told by our teacher to memorize and vomit the answer that closely reflects what is in the textbook and not get creative with our own spin on it. In the years to come, the government did another brilliant move. They mentioned that rural students were not scoring enough in the exams even with such a dilipated pattern and so they decided to solve the problem by reducing the complexity of the concepts. The end result: The students score very heavily in the exams but come out as complete duds when they are ready to enter college or compete at high levels.

The year was 1999. Exactly 2 decades ago. I was doing a MBA program at one of the leading Management institutes in the country and it was the 2^nd trimester. The course was “Corporate Finance” which is one of the foundational courses to understanding the study of Finance. The exam paper had 2 components which was based on a case study. The case study was quite typical. A bank had to decide if it had to offer a loan to a business. Several details of the financials of the business as well as interactions of the business owners with the bank manager had been provided. The 2 components were as follows (Each component had a 1 hour duration and each had 15 marks)

1. Prepare a cash flow statement based on the balance sheet, income statement and other information provided. (Do note that in those days, Cash flow statement was not a mandatory statement required and it was considered a decent skill to prepare one based on the other information available)
2. Based on the cash flow statement, provide a recommendation on whether the loan could be granted or not to the business.

Further it was an open-book exam. Seems quite simple? Unfortunately not to me. The pre-requisite to this course was Financial Accounting which was taught in the first trimester. Thanks to a very enterprising professor who had made it his life ambition to confuse the shit out of students, very few of the non-Commerce students understood the mechanics of this important course. Preparing a cash flow statement was one of the topics in this course and despite some decent effort, my mental faculties could not understand the concept.

Coming back to the present, I tortured myself to somehow get through both the components. However, my cash flow statement never really tallied and I was reasonably sure that it would be quite difficult to open my account in this exam. A week later, it was time to collect the evaluation results from our professor (an exceptionally bright gentleman and gifted teacher who headed the finance department). As he drew out my answer sheets from the pile, he looked quite amused and asked me to sit down. I had got 10.5 /30. This included a 0 from component 1 and the remaining from component 2. And these were his comments to me

1. When I looked at your cash flow statement, I was quite appalled and was wondering at to how low have the standards of this institution have come to?
2. However when I looked at your recommendation, it did give me hope that all is not lost as the argument put forth had good logic and sound judgement associated with it

And with that, he recommended a few things to learn to improve my accounting competency. But more importantly, he emphasized the point that learning is what will help in real life and not studying. The ability to form reasonable judgement with the available information is more important than just learning the mechanics. The mechanics were important but that doesn’t take the inert ability to listen, think and learn.

As amusing as these incidents are, the focus on studying these days has reached unprecedented levels which has put a tremendous pressure on the entire community including parents, students, teachers and administrators.

• A student’s success is only evaluated by the marks that they get in an evaluation which in several cases can be achieved with minimal learning. This gives a completely false sense of achievement which in several cases become a significant liability as rubber hits the road in real life.
• Getting into elite schools, which is again a reflection of the success quotient gives parents a feeling that they have secured their child’s future. The US college scam that unearthed last year is a direct result of this phenomenon.
• One phenomenon that is taking a lot more cadence recently is the support that more affluent parents give to their wards to take any means of support to be successful in the chosen elite school. Job platforms like UpWork are full of students posting their assignments and getting freelancers to solve these assignments for a fee. Or parents/students buying ready made engineering grade projects rather than work at something which requires hard work.
• An even more crushing phenomenon is when a student doesn’t get the desired marks or doesn’t make it to an elite school and then gets branded as a loser by the entire community.
• Further exams are increasingly becoming a test of one’s memory or problem solving based on a set of standard patterns. Either ways, they don’t do any justice to the human’s potential to think and learn.

Studying is a phase that a human goes through with intensity for a max of about 20-25 years in the initial part of their life, however learning is continuous throughout life. Qualities like Problem solving, humility, empathy and perseverance to pursue one’s passion are more likely for a person to have a more fulfilled life as opposed to getting window-dressed as successful based on a set of myopic evaluation criteria.

Children have tremendous potential. However, “A fish just cannot be judged by its ability to climb a tree.” Understanding the inert nature of what the child is passionate about or alternately inculcating a sense of learning into the child so that it can unearth its own potential are fundamental to parenting instead of making a show-piece of them to show an artificial sense of success at something which is not their forte. As Dr. Abdul Kalam once said

• It doesn’t matter what is taught? What matters is how it is taught so that it inculcates a sense of learning
• It doesn’t matter what is the result? Having the humility and enlightenment to learn is more important than the result which is a side-effect

An Albert Einstein would probably never clear a CBSE board exam or an IIT JEE test. A Dr. Abdul Kalam would probably never clear the CAT exam or get into Havard Business School. Neither would a Dhirubai Ambani? However, what they have taught us is that great achievers do not get to where they were by following status quo. They got to where they were by challenging status quo. And if in the name of studying, we decide to measure our children by pre-defined evaluation criteria, how do we really prepare them for the challenge of tomorrow?

In an era of artificial intelligence or machine learning, isn’t it our responsibility to unleash the most advanced natural intelligence that is available : the human’s ability to learn? The digital era is going to be less and less about the human’s ability to memorize or retain or just conforming to pre-set patterns. The availability of data is quite ubiquitous. It is going to be more about the ability to form judgements by clearing the clutter, the ability to fail fast & learn more and the ability to push changes through confused masses (who are likely to be mis-interpret things due to availability of too much information). Maybe time to not let the tail wag the dog.

As Ranchod Das chanchad would say in the below video