Man From Matunga

Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) is an extremely engag­ing pro­gram when it comes to under­stand­ing the state of knowl­edge of the peo­ple in our coun­try. And yet, the whole pro­gram is really only about mem­o­riz­ing and remem­ber­ing facts and mak­ing edu­cated guesses.
Unlike in the past, more and more today, when infor­ma­tion is freely avail­able at the touch of a mouse-click, the need to store data in our brains is becom­ing redun­dant. As I tell my stu­dents, it is not nec­es­sary to remem­ber obscure facts any­more; as long as you know where to find the answers quickly and eas­ily, that is good enough. What we need is the abil­ity to think through the infor­ma­tion avail­able and to use it to answer the ques­tions that we have in front of us, in the best pos­si­ble man­ner. All of this requires the abil­ity to think crit­i­cally.
And sadly, this is an area where most of us fall short. While we are get­ting to be more and more lit­er­ate, this does not seem to trans­late into our being able to ana­lyze and cri­tique sit­u­a­tions and peo­ple around us or to be able to sift between fact and fic­tion when we read news­pa­pers or watch tele­vi­sion.
And yet with­out the abil­ity to think crit­i­cally, we become sit­ting ducks for those who want to influ­ence us using false pro­pa­ganda via pop­u­lar media. One of the prime require­ments of a leader is to be able to think and ana­lyze crit­i­cally and those who are able to do so suc­cess­fully usu­ally find them­selves in such posi­tions as well.
Three days ago, I was invited to lis­ten to and com­ment upon pre­sen­ta­tions made by two groups of Class XI stu­dents of a South Mum­bai IB school on the ethics of cloning and gen­der selec­tion. The exer­cise was per­formed to ini­ti­ate the stu­dents into the art and sci­ence of being able to crit­i­cally ana­lyze data and even­tu­ally use it to present var­i­ous facets of the ethics related to these issues. Given their age and the milieu the stu­dents come from, they did quite a good job.
The vast major­ity of our schools how­ever still only encour­age stu­dents to mem­o­rize facts and to regur­gi­tate them when asked. And while many schools now encour­age project-based learn­ing, none of these allows a stu­dent to learn how to think, cri­tique and ana­lyze. And very rarely do we find teach­ers who encour­age stu­dents to ques­tion every fact and assump­tion that they are being forced to believe, sim­ply because our cur­ric­ula just do not allow us the lux­ury of time needed to incul­cate these beliefs into our stu­dents.
It is when we real­ize why 2 + 2 is not always 4 that we start think­ing crit­i­cally.
I am bor­row­ing heav­ily from an arti­cle writ­ten by Clif­ford Levy in a recent issue of the New York Times, where he quotes Georgievich Bogin, who runs a school called the New Human­i­tar­ian, in Moscow. While two apples and two oranges add up to four pieces of fruit, two cats and two sausages only add up to two well-fed cats. And if you take two drops of water in a saucer and add two more drops of water, you really only get, one big fat drop of water. It is this abil­ity that allows us to then answer the rid­dle of how many of ten birds are left on a tree after a hunter shoots one.
The infor­ma­tion age is drown­ing us with facts and “knowl­edge”. It is now even more impor­tant than ever before that we learn to step back and “think” and “analyze”.