COMPETITIVE EVALUATION has become an easy and indispensable educational tool, both to motivate students and to encourage excellence. In my article on Thursday, I had shared some reasons why the school where I work, Centre For Learning (CFL), does not use competition as a tool in this way. The question naturally follows: how is excellence encouraged in a school such as ours?
  Perhaps our starting point at CFL is that excellence is for everyone and for everything. Every human being is capable of excellence, in any endeavour she chooses to engage with. This is quite different from the assumption that excellence is reached by a few rare individuals, while the rest of humanity wallows in mediocrity. I feel that this latter assumption is fairly widespread, accounting for the way people have structured many things in society including education. It also explains why society may choose to use competition as a tool to achieve excellence, since that fits in with a picture where a few people succeed and the majority fail. This approach dooms large numbers of people to disappointment. Not to speak of children, who in our current educational system have to face this disappointment right from the age of six!

   If we look at excellence totally differently, as a process of discovery and creativity that is inherently satisfying, it seems clear that it cannot be the exclusive domain of a few. Human beings are capable of such experience, because it derives from a state of mind and not a final product. Excellence is beauty, it is pleasurable in and of itself. Of course, it involves hard work. You have to give your body and soul for it, in a sense. There has to be an immersion in the work, a giving of yourself without resistance. But although this view seems to downplay the importance of the final product, there is no doubt that the outcome of a process does reveal its quality. After all, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
  For a school such as ours, without comparative evaluation, the outcome of any effort certainly has to be ‘judged' against some standard so that we can give the required feedback to a student. What is this standard, if it is not supplied by the performance of others, or by an external board? With experience, we find that a teacher has a fairly good idea of each child's potential. There is definitely an element of comparison here, but to a ‘picture' in the experienced teacher's mind of what is possible for this age group, and given this particular child's back ground and potential. This picture or standard, we have found, is reliable and well defined. In fact it is clear enough that we immediately know when a student's work is ‘too good'- it usually means her mother or father helped too much with the homework! Aiming for excellence regardless of ability or talent leads to an interesting concept, that of doing one's best. It is a frequent point of discussion with students. The aim is not just for me as a teacher to figure out whether the student has done his best, but for him to understand what that means. This is a difficult concept to quantify, especially as no external standard will factor in the student's particular situation. Standardised tests benchmarks, by def inition, don't care about individuals! As I said earlier, with experience a teacher really gets a feel for it, know- ing for sure when someone has not ex- erted effort to do their best. At such times, we can tell the child, your work is sloppy, it can be much better than this. There is no need for the additional "look at X's work, you can do better than him".
  Thus an important part of our education is to help children recognise excellence in various areas of life. This begins right from the first day they join us. From the morning vegetable chopping through academic classes, yoga and fitness, singing at assembly and keeping their rooms clean, quality is em phasised. Shoddy or casual work is point ed out, and often we ask them to redo something till…till when? Till we are sat isfied? satisfied? And Till the stu dent is here comes an inter esting educational challenge!

  Soon after you put aside competition in school, you discover that students do not magically fall into place, striving to do their best, producing excellent work, filled with joy at their accomplishments. Thankfully, many students do have this inner drive to do things well, and take pride in their work. But many do not. As a colleague of mine put it, "if a student is hell bent on doing mediocre work, there is nothing much we can do about it." While it may be tempting to beat the problem with a stick, a carrot or a competition, we find that approach meaningless. By doing that, we completely sidestep the entire issue of resistance. (The old fashioned word for resistance is probably laziness, but I find it unhelpful in understanding anything, and I dislike the word heartily.) Not addressing this movement of resistance is a great dis service to the student. Resistance is a force he will keep facing in himself throughout his life, and here in school is the perfect opportunity for him to learn about it.
  So to complete that earlier sentence, we ask them to redo something till we and they are satisfied, but the emphasis is not on that satisfaction. It is on learning to recognise excellence in both process and product. We make every effort to expose students to the idea of excellence, in our own work as well as in the work of visitors to the school, or in the places and people we take students to visit. The question of quality is always being explored and discussed in different ways. In a recent math class, for example, the teacher pointed out three ways of solving a problem in quadratic equations. One was to use algebra, the mechanical way. Another was to use calculus, using a sledgehammer to kill a fly. But the third was a graphical or visual insight, the elegant way. There was in fact no ‘need' from a syllabus point of view to make these distinctions, since the right answer would come from using algebra anyway. Appreciating the graphical method, however, taught the students that some ways of doing things reveal underlying beauty. The students responded to the ‘excellent' solution instinctively, immediately (in their own words, cool! awesome!).
  As a teacher group, we are quite demanding on ourselves in that way. Whether we are teaching a concept, cooking a meal, washing a plate, writing out a circular for the parents or making an announcement in assembly, we are very aware of the need to do it well, not absentmindedly, shoddily, or casually. For instance when I have not done something well, I point it out to my students and also try to find out why it happened: was I in a hurry, was I tired, did I not enjoy the work, did I just not care? We frequently organise events at school (music concerts, talks by professionals, cultural programmes, melas…). At all these, we make every effort to do an excellent job, and we hope the children recognise and learn from this. There are good indications that they do learn to distinguish excellence from mediocrity. It is apparent in the way they respond to excellence in another, whether that other is an outsider, a teacher or a peer. In fact, not pitting them against each other helps them to appreciate the good work of a peer without conflict!

  Tomorrow: What is the true purpose of education? 

Kamala Mukunda teaches at the Centre for Learning, outside Bangalore, www.cfl.in.

 

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