Jun

4

The results of the end of grade examinations for the 10th and 12th grade students would have been pouring in from all over and the high percentage of marks achieved by the toppers would make think that India must have the most outstanding student population on the planet. Whether it is CBSE exams or the 10th/12th grade exams from individual states, the toppers are typically topping with high nineties, seemingly acing every question.

For more than a decade now, an obscure town in Maharashtra has continually amazed the state with extraordinary numbers for its resident students. The ‘Latur Pattern’, as is it known, is an educational pattern that has suddenly catapulted a small town into the toppers’ lists with unfailing consistency, year after year. The pattern consists of continuous and methodical practice of a model set of question papers a few months before the actual exams. Nothing new, you would think, for students preparing for big examinations.

Well, there is news today that there were riots and protests on the streets of this ‘educational’ town, where parents, students and political activists went on a rampage. They were demanding that the authorities ’shelve’ the inquiry into alleged mass-copying by the area students. ‘The rampaging mob pelted stones, damaged furniture and manhandled the HSC board officials and teachers’.

Now, this so-called Latur pattern had been successfully going on for years, producing toppers year after year, making the rest of the state look like dummies and idiots. So what has changed this year? For one thing, the state’s former chief minister Deshmukh, Latur’s local boy, is not the chief minister anymore. He was dismissed late last year, when he couldn’t handle the terrorists in a big city. With a new chief minister in Mumbai, Latur’s fortunes seem to have changed dramatically. And the educational pattern that had been producing the brightest and bestest students, is now shown to be a mass-copying capital where students apparently were given the actual question papers weeks, if not months in advance.

Today the president of India spoke about innovation and education, but she missed mentioning how her own home state had been innovating the education patterns by favoring the chief minister’s constituency and rigging the results on a massive scale. People often speak about overhauling India’s education system, but there’s little mention of the rigging of the examinations and the corruption, criminalization and politicization of the entire educational system, from KG to 12th grade and further to the degree colleges and universities.

A few days ago, a national TV channel interviewed a girl who had apparently topped the CBSE exams. It was horrifying to hear this young girl speak in broken grammar. She couldn’t speak one sentence straight in Hindi or English. If this is the student who topped the national school board, how bad is everyone else then, I thought. But then, hearing the president make her own rehearsed speech, I realized that it doesn’t matter much. We have long thrown out the criteria for merit in education. And everywhere else as well.


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5 Comments so far

  1. Devender Parmar on June 6, 2009 12:32 am

    Ok…don’t flame me for this…but that girl on TV could have been just plain nervous to be on camera.

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