The Mad Competition for Survival

While I have always wanted to travel to India, I’m not here as a tourist. Not this time anyway. This Indian summer is a gift sponsored by the American Councils for International Education, a non-profit organization in Washington DC dedicated to the pursuit of mutual understanding across international borders. I traveled here along with 8 other American educators as part of a group selected to participate in the India Summer Teacher Educational Seminar. And that’s what we’re here to do. Teach. Each of us has been placed in schools across the city. I’ve been placed at the St. James School, one of the oldest and best reputed schools in Kolkata.

We arrived in India on Sunday and settled into our work on Monday by immersing ourselves in a day-long workshop intended to prepare us for our teaching experience. The workshop consisted of an introduction to Kolkata, a lecture on the secondary school system in West Bengal, an overview of our role as visiting educators, a crash-course in Bangla and an overview of medical do’s and dont's. Though we suffered from jet lag, we were inspired by the ample chai and the generosity of our hosts who took every opportunity to ensure that we were comfortable and that we were well taken care of. And we were.

Though I learned quite a bit from each aspect of our workshop (like the difference between Namaste and Nomoshkar and how to interpret or at least embrace the ambiguity of the Indian nod), I found myself most captivated by our lecture on the Indian school system. To put it simply, India suffers from a problem of supply and demand. There are too many students and not enough schools to accommodate them. This results in a culture of testing that seeks to weed students out by the end of their 10^th grade year. At the end of year 10, many students take exams that determine whether or not they can proceed to the 11^th and 12^th grade. If students are successful, they’ll compete for slots in the few colleges and universities available to them. This leads to increased pressure not only on students vying for selective university level education, but also on the teachers who are preparing them for these endeavors. Much like the US, India is beginning to implement teacher evaluation systems that aim to hold educators accountable for student test scores. And much like the US, Indian teachers are skeptical. But what can they do? And what can we do? As Dr. Basab Chaudhuri stated in his lecture, “Education is the key to success in this mad competition for survival.”

School starts tomorrow. Here’s hoping that I can (in some small measure) help my newly-adopted students compete.