Education for examinations or examining educators?

by S. Pathiravitana

Mao Zedong now and Mao Tse-tung then are the same person. The first is how the Chinese say the name and the second is how the English language once Anglicised it. He was, I think, the first to broach the subject of reforming the system of examinations by permitting students to bring any books or notes when answering question papers. Whether his proposal was implemented or not is now lost in the confusion that followed when he let loose the Red Guards to create the now infamous Cultural Revolution.

Cultural Revolution

His idea is now trying to take root, of all places, in Britain where Dr Mike Reddy, a senior lecturer in computer technology at the University of Wales, Newport, is trying to plant it. He has gone even further than Mao and got his students to set the question papers themselves, and also permitted them to bring notes and books to help them answer the papers. Any revolutionary idea like that is bound to let the critics fall on him heavily and he has been forced to defend himself, as reported in the Telegraph, by answering his critics through the Times Higher Educational Supplement.

The main inspiration for this move is his hope that this would encourage the trust he is placing in his students to strengthen the bonds between students and teachers and secondly, 'the common practice,' he says, of recycling past exam papers or giving 'strong hints' to be put aside.

The charge that his open-book method would lead to plagiarism is refuted by him because, he says, when such confidence is placed in students they would be reluctant to betray the trust that the teacher has placed in them. He is not being a romantic idealist in maintaining this stand because he seems to have a gut feeling that people, even in today's cruel and mercenary world, do retain, oddly enough, a morsel of honesty.

But this has not pleased the pessimists among the English who say that some hardheaded business types even now have a poor opinion of graduates.

And his fellow academics seem to think that this will in effect lower professional standards. As for the method that prevails now, where students are expected to place more trust in their memory than on the notes they takes take down, reminds me of what happened in school once.

It was a lesson in Geography and may have dealt with some geographical discoveries. A test paper set on that subject came up in that week's examination paper in class. Our teacher was a man who was nicknamed by the students as Mr Murdstone for his sadistic ways. While announcing the results of the test he expressed satisfaction with the answers except for one student who, he said, had copied his answer from the text book. If he stands up and admits his guilt he would not be punished. There was a hushed silence in the classroom but there was no move made by any student to stand up. Mr Murdstone was beginning to lose his patience and little by little he seemed to be building up his anger but pretending he wasn't. His stern roving eye went round the class and stopped at one boy. "Stand up, Dhanapala," he shouted, The boy stood up trembling.

He walked towards the boy and holding him by his ear said, "You have copied from your geography book, word to word, and you still say you did not copy," he fumed as he spoke. The boy repeated that he did not copy but that he had memorised the passage. Mr Murdstone was flabbergasted. "All right," said Mr Murdstone, sensing victory, "let us hear what you say you have committed to memory." Dhanapala without a pause repeated the passage that he had reproduced in his answer. Mr Murdstone should have collapsed, but he swiftly changed his mood from anger to full apology and was almost fawning on the boy for having misjudged him. The British education system gifted to us with its warts and all have had many critics back at home. From even the days of Shakespeare who commented on how the schoolboy with his satchel and shining morning face crept like a snail unwillingly to school.

Apparently, there wasn't very much fun for him where he was creeping to. And a few centuries later, coming to the days of William Wordsworth, we have heard him saying that the shadows of the prison house begin to fall on the growing boy around this age. And there was Blake bemoaning 'But to go to school on a summer morn/ Oh, it drives all joy away!' These have been overtopped by what Mark Twain said, "Soap and education are not sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run" and how Bernard Shaw put it that he had his education all his life except in school.

Educational turmoil

So, there we are. No wonder the turmoil that education is causing in our country is now approaching the dimensions of a massacre. At first, the ambition of every parent was that his or her little darling should be either a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or an accountant in that descending order. In the early days in Britain, education was not even a primary concern in that country. It was handled by the Church mostly and restricted to spreading what the word of God was all about. With the Church losing its influence following the emergence of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment, education began to put its secular head out.

However, there were doubts and fears from two sides. As Frank Muir says in his book carrying the sub title, 'An Irreverent companion to social history', "The poor on its part viewed education with a certain amount of suspicion, for much the same reason that some of the rich distrusted it, because it blurred social barriers." He goes on to give an example of a mother whose son nearly became a Poet Laureate, removed him from school when he was fourteen because she was afraid that he might become 'too fine a gentleman for the family that produced him.'

And Muir goes on to add, "But most of the antagonism came from farmers and manufacturers who were afraid - quite rightly as it turned out - educating drudges would make them unwilling to remain drudges."

This is exactly what is happening to our agriculture. A young 'educated' girl from Polonnaruwa was saying the other day over the TV that she was jobless, but unwilling to do the kumburu work that is around the place.

We have exported our women to the Middle East and we can well see the holocaust awaiting our traditional village culture, which is said to have once exported our rice, but not the wives and daughters of farmers who are the farmer's greatest assistants.

This is what sensitive poets deplored in Britain, too, around this time - 'A bold peasantry a country's pride/when once destroyed can never be supplied'.

Our country's leaders may not have heard of Oliver Goldsmith, but they may have heard of the 'Red Indians' and this is what they said when the occupiers of their land offered them the gift of education. The offer came soon after Maryland and Virginia signed a treaty with the Indians of the Six Nations followed by an invitation to the Indians to send some of their sons to give them a classical education. And this was the answer:

"We know that you highly esteem the kind of Learning taught in those Colleges, and that the Maintenance of our young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinc'd , therefore, you mean to do us good by your proposal; and we thank you heartily.

But you, who are wise, must know that different Nations have different conceptions of things; and you will not therefore take it amiss, if our ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same with yours.

"We have had some experience of it. Several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger, knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer or kill an enemy, spoke our language imperfectly, and were therefore neither fit for hunters, warriors and counsellors , they were totally good for nothing.

"We are, however, not the less oblig'd by your kind Offer, tho we decline accepting it; and to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia send us a Dozen of their sons we will take care of their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them."