The way maths is imagined and taught must change for children to do better in the subject.
Another survey points to what we knew all along: Children in India are struggling with mathematics. NCERT’s latest National Achievement Survey, the country’s “largest sample survey of learning outcomes for Classes III, V and VIII”, said learning levels for mathematics progressively dipped among government school students as they progressed from one class to the next. While the low numerical skill is part of a larger problem, which includes learning deficit in languages and general awareness, it’s the mathematics score that is worrying. The mathematics score (percentage of questions answered by respondents) in the survey is 64 per cent in Class 3, drops by 10 percentage points to 54 per cent in Class 5, and then to 42 per cent in Class 8. This is in line with the Annual Survey of Education Report finding that at 40-42 per cent, the proportion of youth without basic math skills by age 14 is the same as that of 18-year-olds.
Somewhere in this jumble of numbers lies the problem — and possible solutions. While these annual surveys serve to draw gasps and considerable hand-wringing, it’s time they provoked a more fundamental question on the need to rethink mathematics pedagogy in Indian schools. Much of the problem lies with the way mathematics is taught at the foundational level, where numbers are mere symbols with no context. Three and one is 31, children are told. But what if someone wondered, isn’t 3 and 1, 4. And what is 31? Is it a dry digital/analytical number meant to be written in “units” and “tens” place? Or does 31 have a life of its own? Is it 30 apples and 1 banana? Or 25 pencils and 6 pens? But in a system that’s designed to beat intuition out of every child and which thrives on creating the fear of math in children’s minds, there are no pauses, no attempt to connect math with real-life situations; only a mind-numbing chant to “reinforce concepts”. In short, mathematics, at least the way it is taught in India, has failed to engage with children.
It’s time then to demystify math education in India. To begin with, textbook planners and educators need to ensure that the subject is put in the context of everyday life that the child relates to. More importantly, teachers and children should be encouraged to look at a more flexible way to approach problem-solving — that like with everything else in life, there’s no one way to solve a math problem.