Students set and sit their question papers
S. Pathiravitana
Mao Zedong and Mao Tse-tung 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.
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, was trying to plant it a year or two ago.
“Soap and education are not sudden as a massacre,
but they are more deadly in the long run” - Mark Twain |
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 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!”
and 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.
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.” |