Twelve Idiots

We ended this lazy weekend by watching the eagerly awaited Bollywood film, Three Idiots. Like most Bollywood films, it sent us through a roller coaster of emotions; we repeatedly found ourselves laughing one moment only to be crying the next. I think for most of us, this film struck especially close to home as it made us think about the education system we have been working in for the past six weeks. There were two parts of this movie in particular that reminded me of situations I have encountered in the schools. (I will try to write this blog giving away as little about the movie as possible because I highly recommend everyone watch it.)

The main character, Rancho, is attending an extremely tough engineering school where he is at the top of his class. Rancho has a kind of freedom and creativity that none of his peers, all destined to be engineers from birth, are able to have due to their constant fear of failure and lack of passion. On many occasions, Rancho confronts the headmaster criticizing the schools’ teaching methods. At one point, Rancho expresses his thoughts on the role of grades in the school, he even goes so far as to say that giving students grades is like putting them in castes. This made me think of a particular day at Sri Sai. I thought the students had come to understand that we are not there to grade them or create any kind of class ranking. I realized my assumption was wrong after assessing the students last week. We have created an assessment system for both schools; each child is given three numbers that correlate to certain levels of reading, writing, and communication skills. The assessments are extremely casual to the point that the students would not even know we were evaluating their skills if we weren’t taking notes. After I had conducted all of the assessments students continuously came up to me asking for their marks. I tried to explain to them that they are given no marks, but they just kept asking. I even caught a kid who had found the paper I had been writing on to erase the numbers by his name and replace them with higher ones. It bothered me how much these kids were concerned about their grades. What bothered me even more, though, is how similar we act when we are at Duke, checking Aces every minute after an exam to check our marks.

Another thing that really stuck out to me while watching was the extreme lack of creativity expected from the students. Rancho, naturally, challenged this as well. Professors would become enraged when he would give a non-traditional answer in class and he was nearly kicked out of school for offering a different point of view. Our group has discussed this subject and the frustrations it brings many times. We have all been having trouble encouraging the kids to get creative. For example, the day after we took the Nirmal Nagar students to the zoo, we gave them a piece of paper and crayons and asked them to draw what they had seen at the zoo. We sat down with them and draw our own zoo scenes as examples but they ended up copying our drawings. Some even begged me to draw exactly what I had drawn. It is frustrating how little creativity is valued in education here; this movie did a good job of pointing out the troubles that arise when a students imagination is repressed for so long.