Can we do something to eradicate ROTE LEARNING in India?

"Rote Learning" or Memorization is the most commonly used method of learning in our country. From all the fuss I see on Slashdot, I suspect that China follows India very closely on this. I think South America is also similar. Most of Africa is struggling to provide education. So maybe they can do some rote learning... Maybe they can leapfrog ROTE learning altogether.

There are other variants of rote learning like practicing math. Practice is definitely necessary to make anyone a good mathematician. But if the effort is directed to merely familiarize yourself with the "expected problems in the exam" through repetition, it is no better than memorization. In physics and chemistry, learning to substitute values in equations is no use unless, the real essence of the subject sinks in.

I wish to recollect a recent incident that Raghunath was narrating to me. His sister was "trying to memorize a program to print the Fibonacci sequence". Raghu is not yet much of a programmer though he has written some code with some guidance. But REAP has "spoilt" him beyond repair. So he cannot tolerate such an absurd thing!!! He was nagging his sister and his sisters response was "There are only 12 programs and if I learn them properly I will get the marks. So what is the problem." Her parents joined in and asked Raghu to keep quiet and not unnecessarily trouble his sister. After all she had other subjects to study also!!!

When I heard this, sparks were flying off my head. How can anyone be so dumb?? But then I paused and asked myself, "Whose fault is it anyway?". Raghu's parents wanted the best for their son and daughter. In India parent child relationships are much stronger than in the west. Most of what the parents earn is preserved for the future of the children. This might look absurd from a western perspective where you have 3 marriages and divorces in a life and things look normal. But how can some one tell Raghu's parents that they are hurting her rather than helping her though they don't intend to.

And this is not a freak incident. I have time and again seen a huge obsession with cracking the exam rather than cracking the subject. So the question that needs to be asked is... Who really benefits from Raghu's sister getting the funda behind the Fibonacci series? Raghu's family obviously benefits, but they have no clue!!!

The answer is "THE FUTURE EMPLOYER".

A person like Mr Narayana Murthy or Mr Sam Palmisano or Mr Ambani would benefit by a highly skilled and "useful" workforce. Don't they do anything about it? Well they do try... For Eg people like Mr Murthy keeps emphasizing the need for quality education wherever he goes and so on... But still there is a huge gap... Raghu's parents are still going to live in their own parallel universe. Does "Quality Education" mean "not memorizing the fibonacci program?" or "Memorizing even more programs"? How are they supposed to know? And if she is not going to be a programmer aspiring to join Infosys, is it then ok for her to memorize? Maybe she will get a job in a Bajaj or a Coca Cola...

Rote learning not only hurts Programming... It not only hurts Scientists and Engineers. Even a Salesperson, Accountant, Manager or Call Center Operator needs to know what he is doing. Computers will do all the storing and retrieving of the data. The real job of the person is to figure out what is going on.

I believe that all major CEOs of the world, be it Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Narayana Murthy, the Czars of Biotech, Oil n Natural gas, Manufacturing... Just about every brand that has been registered in the minds of the Indian should take a Unified full page ad on the front page of every newspaper in every language proclaiming that "ROTE LEARNING IS USELESS". If your scores can be attributed to Rote learning, you will NOT GET A JOB WITH US. Of course you could do well in your exam AFTER figuring out what you have learnt. But you cant join us if you behave as if your head is a replacement for a HARD DISK. The page must contain the trademark of each company as well as the signatures of the CEOs.

If a guy like Raghu, needs to answer his parents, he just needs to thrust this paper on their face and declare : "All the bosses in the world say, If she memorizes the fibonacci program she wont get a Job". It is a lot more powerful argument than, "She won't be able to appreciate the beauty of programming".

Is this going to be a very costly exercise? Companies place full page ads just to recruit individual positions for their companies. Here a single sheet is shared by thousands of companies. The cost per company would be negligible and would not even make a tiny dent in their ad expenditure. But the unified Message is STRONG!!! If done on a nationwide scale in a synchronized manner across languages across industries, people like Raghu's parents can't help but notice it. In fact the exercise would even strengthen the brand image of the participating companies saying that they really care about education. The price they pay would be an insignificant fraction of their marketing budgets.

Firefox which is an open-source browser manged to pull off such a campaign. Here we are talking about Chief Executive Officers who are rolling in money. And they desperately NEED a better pool of high quality professionals to hire from. They can wait 5 years to see the results. They will gladly agree.

The thing that is left to be done is to use all the people on the planet who are as frustrated as Raghu and me to propagate this message to other such frustrated people so that it can cascade and reach the CEOs of all companies that matter. All the IITans and the guys from the IIMs and research institutions and all freaks across the nation, please pass this message on until it makes it way to the top. Digg this, slashdot this... do whatever you can... Here is an invitation to all geeks across the nation to help eradicate the menace of rote memorization. You are doing yourself the greatest favor by doing this. You will have fewer morons to argue with. You will need to clean up the mess on fewer computers of your relatives. You will get to live in a more interesting world.

Hope this also spreads to other countries where rote memorization is rampant. It should become clear to every one that, if you rely on rote memorization, the only place you can get a job is the government. And the role of the govt is declining fast in the country. Most public sector undertakings are getting privatized. So the message to all Rote learners from all the CEOs shall be "Make yourself USEFUL".

How can each child on this planet be given a laptop?

For a moment let us keep the question of whether we need to give each child a laptop aside and ask what does it cost to give each child a laptop. The world has between 6 and 7 billion people. Assuming that we declare all people b/w the ages of 5 and 21 as kids. It would not be too wrong to say that we need to give out about a billion laptops. Let us say each laptop costs about $100 by 2010. I think OLPC will be able achieve the $100 mark at the earliest. I guess even the competitors of the OLPC laptops like the eee PC , the classmate PC and so on will be able to achieve a similar price unless they unnecessarily get distracted by features. This would mean that we need about $100 billion.

Moore's law will halve the price thereafter. When I was in college I thought the cellphone would be just a dream. Today even my maid servants and auto rickshaw drivers have cellphones. In a few years I am sure that I will be able to talk to anyone anytime over my cell 24X7 and it would be free. We already have Skype, Google talk etc. With widespread Wifi and WiMax Deployments and their successors, shuttling voice over IP around would be trivial even from ur phone. The same would be the case with affordability of laptops but it may take just a little bit longer.

If you look at $100 billion. It will look insanely large from a layman perspective. But to get an idea of how big or small this amount is, you need to compare it to the size of similar things. For Eg look at Microsoft. It has a Market Capitalization of 319.49 Billion on 6th Dec 2007. Google had a Market Capitalization of 218.52 Billion on the same day. Of course, you cannot look at Market Cap and treat it like hard cash. If the CEOs sold all their shares on a single day, the market cap would vaporize in an instant. But hey still have huge piles of cash and immense power.

Google bought Youtube for a 1.6 billion dollars. They are giving away 300 Million dollars in the Google Lunar XPrize for the first privately funded lunar lander. That is 3 followed by eight zeros. All that just for showing off their geek pride ;-).

Have you ever wondered where all that money pours into google? No it is not their search engine!!! It is advertising!!! Google is the world's largest advertising company. Most of their money comes from the Google Ads. I am not making this up. Use Google itself to check whether I am saying the right thing. Each time you click on a Google Ad, they get at least 5 cents or Rs 3. Usually the amounts are much larger. Did you ever imagine that google could get something like Rs 10 just because someone just clicked on a Google Ad?? Fortunately or unfortunately this is TRUE.

Who pays that money?? The consumer pays that tax!!! Each time you buy a car or a wrist watch or a camera or a bubble gum, you are paying an absurd amount towards advertising. Ask an MBA, how much money the marketing department gets in comparison to their research labs or product development teams and you will get a stunning response. You think a few cents or rupees from ur wristwatch or camera are going towards advertising?? think again!!! Where do you think the Money for tycoons like Rupert Murdoch comes from??

Now let us ask ourselves this question... How much does a child need to pay per day, if he has to earn the laptop in 3 years. Let us say each year has 333 days. So we have 1000 days. So the kid needs to earn less than 10 cents per day or less than Rs 4!!! That is like clicking a single google ad per day. Of course pointlessly clicking a Google Ad is illegal. What I mean to say is that, the amount of advertising required to for a kid to earn the laptop is as low as the advertising needed to make a person spontaneously click a Google Ad.

If each student is given a laptop and all education happens through it, then you have a fixed channel, that has exclusive access to the kid, for about 8 to 10 hrs per day. Even a cable channel would feel envious at that.

It should be a no brainer to integrate advertising elegantly without compromising on the quality of educational content. Because such a SMALL amount of advertising is sufficient to keep the system going.

There would be plenty of students for whom $100 is small change. For them, completely ad free solutions can be provided. Another approach could be make students a part of networks such the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Earning 10 cents per day on Amazon Mechanical turk should be a no brainer. The class teacher in conjunction with Amazon can set an upper limit on the earnable amount, so that the school does not turn into a sweatshop and kids into zombies. The governments can pass rules forbidding the usage of the system beyond a certain threshold and classifying it as child labor if the limits are exceeded.

But 10 cents or Rs 4 is a very tiny amount per day. I think you can earn 10 cents by answering 10 CAPTCHAS at the rate of 1 CAPTCHA for each cent. Or maybe google could ask the kids to participate in the Google Image Labeller and so on. 1 cent for 5 Images labelled. The IQ of the kids would also improve by this.

What do you think? Is it impossible for a kid to earn back his laptop in 3 years?? Do you think that I am misrepresenting the situation? Don't think about what happens if each student has a laptop... That is a separate issue... Just because a your cable TV have Discovery channel or NGC or History channel, a student will not immediately switch to watching it. He would still choose Cartoon network or POGO. Dumping laptops onto the child wont solve problems. In no time it will turn into a gaming device and usually the preferred game would be a shootem up or a racing game. But let us keep all that aside for the moment. Let us just focus on the question "Is it even possible to make a child painlessly and effortlessly earn his own laptop??"

How hard would it be to bring about a system where each student manages to earn his own Laptop? Should one wait for the governments to do infinite time pass and slowly adopt the laptops as Nicholas Negroponte suggests? Let the governments focus on arranging food for the starving millions... One thing I can assure you is that no Indian Politician is capable of giving laptops to kids and win votes using that. They can give out televisions/jewelery/alcohol and win elections... But laptops to kids?? no chance!!! Nicholas Negroponte must be daydreaming.

Do we have to rely on charity like the G1G1 program for this to happen?? As a parent in the US, would I give a Lenovo or HP or Mac laptop to my kid for $500 plus some more... or would I donate to kids in an African country? I dont deny that there are nice parents who would do that. But how many? Is the G1G1 program sustainable after each geek has got an OLPC laptop for himself?

Can't capitalism and corporate greed be exploited constructively to give laptops to billions?? Is there something wrong in doing that?

Arguments about Constructivism

The guys at OLPC are obsessed with constructivism. But the rest of the world seems obsessed with criticizing this. I am going to do my own share of critising soon... but some opposing arguments are outright silly. One argument says that, "Did the exisitng system not produce everything we have? So it is unfair to criticize it" There are two parts to it. A lot of credit of what we are today goes to people who managed to cleverly bypass the system. They did whatever they did in spite of the system. Just think of them all... Aristotle, Socretes, Galelio, Edison, Einstein... Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Dhirubai Ambani, Narayana Murthy... the list just goes on...

I don't know whether I will accomplish anything worthwhile beyond talking to myself through a blog. But if I did accomplish something worthwhile, would I thank the system for all the rituals it made me follow? I don't think so.

The real question is not whether the current lousy setup can produce results. The question is how do you prevent the wastage of the rest of the intellectuals who are crushed before they blossom.