Could we look at improving educational policy differently? Could we try using a different perspective to recognize and propose a change for specific flaws?
According to ancient Greece, there are 3 kinds of knowledge. Namely doxa, episteme, and gnosis.
Doxa can be seen as a statement or proposal of sorts. You ‘know’ something under Doxa when someone informs you or if you read about it somewhere. You don’t know an electric plug on the wall may injure you if you are not too careful, so you are told that it can hurt you.
Episteme is something close to thinking and reasoning out something that happens using some amount of logic to conclude you’ll know. You don’t need to experience jumping from a height to know it might hurt. We could even call some of this kind of knowledge intuition.
Gnosis is the knowledge that is experienced, like touching a hot pan and knowing it’s too hot.
All three of these kinds of knowledge are useful in their way and are essential for forming any range of ideas.
Let's try taking this to look at how knowledge is passed on in our educational systems today. For an ideal system, we could argue that having more gnosis, some amount of episteme, and a stable amount of Doxa would help in making students learn through experience and reasoning, using some amount of basic information to understand better.
Let's now try applying it to a standard Indian education system with a few assumptions and analysis.
When we think of CBSE, it has a high emphasis on information retention, asking specific facts and sections of its textbook to differentiate the different kinds of students who may score a certain grade on its final paper, usually having some numerical problems as well in the case of subjects such as accounts, physics or chemistry. These numerical problems often come from the textbook with only slighted variation and spins, usually retaining similar steps of the approach.
Since most CBSE schools lay heavy emphasis on students doing well on their final CBSE tests to rank higher in school result comparisons, we can assume that excelling for these tests is a highly sought upon goal. Let’s also understand that for the sciences, many labs may not be well equipped for student use, or may not be emphasized as ‘important, given that the final scores of students are often minorly impacted by doing as many mistakes on a lab exam than say, a final paper. Using this analysis, we can come to the conclusion that the system lays great emphasis on the use of doxa, which is information that is simply instructed, over the other two.
The system’s lack of episteme and gnosis could pose a problem, actively pushing information to students without necessarily relying on other forms of understanding or knowledge may stunt their ability to form newer ideas from old ones and make them unable to go further than what information they are given at face value. There have been multiple policies implemented to improve education, the most expensive one being the use of ‘smart’ boards. In 2019, the HRD ministry of India even took it upon itself to push ‘Operation Digital Blackboard’, a scheme to provide every government school classroom in India a digital blackboard with a trained teacher for its operation. These blackboards, in simpler terms, are giant touch screens with internet access.
Teachers and facilitators argue that this board is useful for active student engagement and the ability to provide greater access to different e-resources which may be of enriching value for students and educators.
If we see how we’ve applied our knowledge model, we’ll notice that the problem isn’t necessarily solved and may lie elsewhere.
Methods of teaching, lab equipment, non-updated syllabus, and similar originally existing issues being fixed may make much more of a difference. Without solving these, additional fixtures may not provide as many benefits to our students as we would want them to.
The new Education Policy makes it even more layered, with plenty of new features to a machine that doesn’t seem to work properly in the first place.
Education under the pandemic seems to show how even more ineffective these moves truly are. The teaching system in its current, raw state can only give more doxa to students over a screen, with avail to online resources still futile since the knowledge never went beyond the textbook anyway, clearly rendering policies to expand education with e-resources and digitization quite futile.
With new challenges, final exams have been pushed, doxa has been well challenged, and the cracks are starting to widen a bit too much. If the way we transfer knowledge to students has barely undergone any change given the circumstances, it becomes clear that the way we teach has little to do with the medium and location and everything to do with the way we teach and to what end we teach something.
Unfortunately, our policies seem to do little to change original teaching structures and requirements. We often support these policies because many of us don’t necessarily see the central issue behind our lagging education. Today, policy tends towards adding more, often expensive, features without tackling our teaching mechanisms and end-goals. If policies were made towards fixing original system issues and changing the methods of imparting information, we may be moving towards growth in student learning and application. For that to happen, we need to stop looking into newer technology and add-ons for our education. Even though it may look enticing as it is, it won’t make any change if we don’t change the original structure of education.
This could be done in an inexhaustive list of ways that most foreign education systems currently inculcate today such as finding applications for their subjects, research analysis, and having an extended reading session with classroom discussion. With this change in outlook and an increase in discussion in changing learning methods, we may finally address problems within our system and change them for the better.
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