There is a puzzling problem in Indian classrooms.
It is this: curious, alert, socially capable children
come into our classrooms year after year and
somehow we manage to teach them in a way
that a significant percentage of them lose their
interest to learn within the first three years of
school education. Is it surprising, then, that every
large-scale assessment conducted in the last dozen
years in our country shows that many children
cannot even read or write at a basic level, even
though they have progressed to higher grades?
The noted psycholinguist, Jim Gee, pointed to this
absurdity that also happens regularly in American
classrooms: children who spend years struggling
to acquire a comfortable knowledge of, say, the
twenty-six letters of the English alphabet (and the
rules to apply them to reading), can miraculously
learn hundreds of abstract symbols and rules in a
matter of weeks when you give them video games
to play
