Pedagogy of our classroom

Education is a moral weapon to transform the society. It is a route to better life. But not all education necessarily transforms the society; it depends upon the pedagogy of the classroom. Students should be able to translate the things they have learned to practice for the prosperity of the society. The disheartening fact is, our mode of education that is restricted to rote learning, attending lectures and taking exams is no way able to transform our society. Herein lie the problems ingrained in our pedagogy that we've been practicing.Our mode of learning has dissuaded critical thinking, analysis and synthesis; it is limited to learning dry facts and theorems, and fails to understand that teaching-learning is an intertwined process. In other word, teaching here means simply to teach a book. So what is the problem in merely teaching the book? Let me present a situation here: Imagine you are given a map of the US and assigned to locate Kathmandu. What will happen? No matter how hard you try, you are unlikely to locate Kathmandu unless you critically think and find that to locate Kathmandu, you need the map of Nepal, not that of the US. This is what our pedagogy is not doing; students are not given the freedom to posit their ideas and perception on the matter; in other words, they are dehumanized.

Some 50 years ago, a notable scholar Paulo Freire would understand this and wrote a book 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed.' According to Freire, our education is dehumanizing both the students and the teachers, inhibiting the liberalization of people and impeding transformation of the society at large. He observed that our pedagogy of classroom follows top-down approach where a teacher is a 'narrator' and students are the 'listening objects'—what he called a 'banking model.'

The worst form of dehumanization is practiced in the colleges of Nepal. On a lighter note, let me share my experience. During my engineering education here in Kathmandu, we used to stand in a long queue to photocopy notes of our lecturers, and visit nearby stationeries where one could easily find the solutions and guess papers, at times authored by our own lecturers. While the technical education where usually bright students of the nation are enrolled suffers from this 'disease', imagine how grave the scenario of other institutions and faculties might be.

Our education is not concerned with the substance of learning and fails to understand and address the problems of society. A teacher should work as a moderator to elevate the students from their 'real consciousness' to their 'potential consciousness.' Every teacher should inspire students to find a unique solution to the existing problems. And students hold that potential. Now comes the enormity of the pedagogue to tap the potentials of the young minds.

As the debate of "remaking" the nation is ongoing, educational approach should be discussed in good length. Better education is imperative for the prosperity of the nation. When students are treated holistically in a collaborative fashion, knowledge no longer becomes confined to four walls of the classroom but integrated to the society; it identifies problems of the society and comes with the solutions. This is high time we shoulder the responsibility of humanizing the students and move in tandem with the world.

Shailesh is a graduate of Electrical Engineering from Kathmandu Engineering College in Kalimati, Kathmandu.

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