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Ha, anybody who thinks memorization is a Western thing hasn't experienced Indian schools. Isn't Flat Earthism an American phenomenon? If so, the school system

Ha, anybody who thinks memorization is a Western thing hasn't experienced Indian schools. Isn't Flat Earthism an American phenomenon? If so, the school system wouldn't explain why Europe doesn't have it.

chrismorgan 5y ago
Excerpt from a text book in Hyderabad in 2006: “Why is a computer called a number cruncher?” “A computer is called a number cruncher because it crunches numbers with its teeth.” Students were expected to write down exactly that answer. This is a particularly crazy example, but my favourite and by no means isolated. Rote learning is certainly taken to an extreme in the Indian system, though it has been improving a bit over the past couple of decades.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  A computer was a person who made computations. The electronic things were named after a person's job. Number cruncher is probably a 1990s affectation. The teeth thing is a bit worrying.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  Is it part of some broader analogy or something? I don't understand at all.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  There has to be something mistranslated here somewhere.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    No; it’s much simpler than that: the Indian education system is immature, which often leads to the blind leading the blind, and such stunningly bad errors as this because the writers of the textbook were incompetent. I’m fairly confident in this case that the writer deliberately made something up because he had heard this expression (an English expression, you’ll note—Telugu and Hindi probably don’t have a direct equivalent), figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor. Simplifying and not getting into the cultural aspects which are also significant: Most of the people in the country are uneducated or poorly educated. You need teachers to teach, but there are nowhere near enough qualified ones. Unskilled teachers can’t teach understanding since they lack it themselves, and so they favour rote learning, and textbooks do too. This builds up a lot of inertia, so that it takes several generations to break out of it rather than just one or two as you might hope. As usual, the poor are especially badly affected by it, since they’re much less likely to get a competent teacher. English-medium teaching also comes into the equation as a double-edged sword, having advantages and disadvantages that I won’t get into.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      > figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor. Why not just get textbooks from the US then? If they are going to teach in English anyways, someone already went through the trouble of writing those.
      - chrismorgan 5y ago
        Importing textbooks or syllabi from another country doesn’t work well, because there’s a lot of culture that goes into such things, far more than you probably realise, and Indian culture is very different from such as British, Australian, Canadian and American. For some subjects it will work better than others, but it’s a total non-starter as a general strategy even from a technical aspect, quite apart from the politics that would render it quite untenable (especially with India’s nationalism and comparatively recent independence from the British). Even so, there are some places where foreign culture has unduly influenced the textbooks; for example, the Class III and IV Social Studies textbooks go over the seasons, and teach as fact the four season model with snow and all, which is only suitable for temperate or subarctic climates (and doesn’t always have snow); it’s wildly inappropriate in Hyderabad and India at large, which have a radically different, monsoony sequence, reckoned in 3, 4 or 6 seasons. And none of the kids have ever seen snow, Hyderabad’s record low being 6°C. I would also note that getting incompetent teachers only capable of rote-based teaching to use syllabi or textbooks designed for understanding-based teaching will be a disaster.
cm2187 5y ago
And I understand it is one level further up in China (memorisation wise). I still think it’s a form of trolling to make people mad. And it works. A form of “fuck you” to the ellite.

chrismorgan 5y ago

Excerpt from a text book in Hyderabad in 2006: “Why is a computer called a number cruncher?” “A computer is called a number cruncher because it crunches numbers with its teeth.” Students were expected to write down exactly that answer. This is a particularly crazy example, but my favourite and by no means isolated. Rote learning is certainly taken to an extreme in the Indian system, though it has been improving a bit over the past couple of decades.

gerdesj 5y ago
A computer was a person who made computations. The electronic things were named after a person's job. Number cruncher is probably a 1990s affectation. The teeth thing is a bit worrying.
bee_rider 5y ago
Is it part of some broader analogy or something? I don't understand at all.
908B64B197 5y ago
There has to be something mistranslated here somewhere.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  No; it’s much simpler than that: the Indian education system is immature, which often leads to the blind leading the blind, and such stunningly bad errors as this because the writers of the textbook were incompetent. I’m fairly confident in this case that the writer deliberately made something up because he had heard this expression (an English expression, you’ll note—Telugu and Hindi probably don’t have a direct equivalent), figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor. Simplifying and not getting into the cultural aspects which are also significant: Most of the people in the country are uneducated or poorly educated. You need teachers to teach, but there are nowhere near enough qualified ones. Unskilled teachers can’t teach understanding since they lack it themselves, and so they favour rote learning, and textbooks do too. This builds up a lot of inertia, so that it takes several generations to break out of it rather than just one or two as you might hope. As usual, the poor are especially badly affected by it, since they’re much less likely to get a competent teacher. English-medium teaching also comes into the equation as a double-edged sword, having advantages and disadvantages that I won’t get into.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > figured it was relevant, but didn’t know the answer and didn’t bother to investigate, because who cares what the answer is anyway? It’s just computers, no one needs to know about them anyway. That English was probably his third language will probably have contributed a bit (he would probably recognise a similar phrase in Telugu of an object he was familiar with as a metaphor), but it won’t have been the most important factor. Why not just get textbooks from the US then? If they are going to teach in English anyways, someone already went through the trouble of writing those.
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      Importing textbooks or syllabi from another country doesn’t work well, because there’s a lot of culture that goes into such things, far more than you probably realise, and Indian culture is very different from such as British, Australian, Canadian and American. For some subjects it will work better than others, but it’s a total non-starter as a general strategy even from a technical aspect, quite apart from the politics that would render it quite untenable (especially with India’s nationalism and comparatively recent independence from the British). Even so, there are some places where foreign culture has unduly influenced the textbooks; for example, the Class III and IV Social Studies textbooks go over the seasons, and teach as fact the four season model with snow and all, which is only suitable for temperate or subarctic climates (and doesn’t always have snow); it’s wildly inappropriate in Hyderabad and India at large, which have a radically different, monsoony sequence, reckoned in 3, 4 or 6 seasons. And none of the kids have ever seen snow, Hyderabad’s record low being 6°C. I would also note that getting incompetent teachers only capable of rote-based teaching to use syllabi or textbooks designed for understanding-based teaching will be a disaster.

cm2187 5y ago

And I understand it is one level further up in China (memorisation wise). I still think it’s a form of trolling to make people mad. And it works. A form of “fuck you” to the ellite.