Dr. Nanadkumar M Kamat
A doctorate in Micro-biology, is a scientist and science writer.
A quarter century of guiding scientific research projects at the post graduate level shows me that the highly educated and wealthy state of Goa lacks a ‘science for the sake of science’ serious culture of scientific research involving passionate young students who are not worried about the marks, immediate rewards or publicity.
February 28 is dedicated to the celebration of the discovery of Raman effect. Nobel laureate C V Raman made the discovery with his own made-in-India inexpensive instruments. When I interviewed his associate scientist Jatkar in Goa he said: “Raman was not interested in patenting his discovery because he thought it belonged to the whole world.” Jatkar also informed that since this discovery was not patented, other inventors earned billions of dollars by patenting related inventions like the Raman spectrometers.
It is the 36th National Science Day on February 28 and last year nobody had thought that a viral pandemic would hit India. More than a viral pandemic what should bother the intellectual class and educational planners is a different kind of pandemic that is ‘memory-based learning for getting high marks’. It is the pandemic of the ‘mark’ based academic culture which has caused heavy degeneration and deterioration of research culture.
It has been amply demonstrated that the students love marks more than serious research and it is more heart-breaking when those who opt for science stream see no value in doing serious scientific research. Teachers in colleges are not much worried about it as those in the universities do. Post globalisation we found a certain kind of laid-back attitude and laziness among students who join the science streams. Then the ‘short cut’ culture of minimalism invaded educational campuses of Goa and the very foundation of the ethos of curiosity based scientific research was eroded.
Generally, students at the level of high schools are producing wonderful results in state and national level science competitions, model making competitions, various Olympiads but once they feel the performance pressure to excel in public examinations the passion in science, the childlike curiosity and interest in research evaporates.
It was a good lesson for me when many postgraduate students who completed wonderful scientific projects under my guidance admitted that they had opted to work under me mostly because they knew that they would get high internal marks as compared to other students. This was not true because all the students under me who had earned high marks had indeed put in a lot of field and laboratory work. However, the entire exercise of mentoring, guiding and counselling more than 75 postgraduate science students showed me that there is nothing in the society to inculcate a strong and deeply rooted culture of research based on objectivity, rationality and precision. Serious scientific research demands a lot of patience. When any field or laboratory experiments are planned one needs to wait patiently to get the results to prove or disprove a particular scientific hypothesis. The ‘minimalist academic culture’ in higher educational institutions in Goa has been a bane of serious scientific research.
India needs a vast pool of scientific manpower in this decade but students seem to run after marks and not in pursuit of research. Another problem is the lack of self-confidence among students who parade their high marks and awards. Most of these students only master the art of passing the memory-based examinations with high marks and when confronted with basic scientific ideas miserably fail to elaborate anything. A majority of science students in Goa from higher secondary school level to post graduate level don’t know anything about ‘reasoning’ and inductive and deductive logic. They have been turned into machines which memorise readymade notes to write answers to direct questions. The science teachers know that any internal or external examination based on ‘indirect questions’ would produce disastrous results. It is easy to get full marks for questions like ‘what is the shape of Earth?’ but it’s difficult for the same students to answer ‘why is Earth shaped like a geoid?’
Merely possession of a degree in education gives the new science teachers the power of promoting the same old culture of learning without reasoning and understanding and answering direct questions to score high marks. There is no intellectual and creative space in this culture for promoting serious scientific research. The exceptions in every batch, every class basically prove the rule that science students in Goa view any assessed scientific assignment or project, dissertation, report or thesis merely as an exercise to get high marks. This is the reason why in contravention to the national science policy, under tremendous pressure from teachers themselves, Goa University changed the progressive policy of making research-based dissertations compulsory at the post graduate level. The so called ‘optional dissertation projects’ have become a mockery of research. Ironically, teachers too feel relieved as project supervisors and guides since there is less pressure on them.
I remember that I had supervised 13 postgraduate science students (botany and biotechnology) in my lab successfully in a single academic year and all of them would vouch today if they are reading this how much interest I had generated in them about doing serious and novel scientific research.
Until the craze for high marks is delinked from serious scientific research in higher education it would be impossible to create a healthy culture of ‘science for the sake of science’ in Goa following the footsteps of Nobel laureate C V Raman.