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What Indian schools can learn from Einstein and Marie Curie
What Indian schools can learn from Einstein and Marie Curie Premium
Everyone in India has met that one teacher who could make the toughest topic feel like a bedtime story. In my school, it was our physics teacher in grade 8, whose board work was so crisp that even numerical problems looked like poetry. Everyone loved him because no one needed to worry about Physics. It was taken care of, until one fine day, he broke his arm while playing, and another Physics teacher replaced him.
The new teacher's way of teaching was not at all lucid. He asked us questions about the topics that we had earlier learnt. The usual response from us was that it was never discussed in class. Gradually, we found that though we had understood, we never had a deeper connection with the topics. Interestingly, one day, he introduced us to a concept with deliberate mistakes in it that no one in our class noticed. He then nudged us to question and not always to believe what he said.
We felt challenged in his class and, at times, experienced some degree of discomfort. He had a knack for asking questions that seemed simple, yet all of us got them wrong. Soon, we began to get accustomed to his way of teaching. Surprisingly, some of us in his class began to develop a deeper bond with Physics. I still vividly remember some of the problems we worked on together.
What made the new teacher's class memorable? - It is productive struggle. Lucid explanations, though comforting, often give students the illusion of mastery. When a concept is explained so clearly that it feels understood, students rarely feel the need to engage further — to question, to apply, or to struggle. This “cognitive fluency” leads to passive learning.
As educators, the goal should not be clarity alone, but to promote productive struggle, provoke curiosity and cognitive dissonance.
A successful program called Art of Problem Solving (AoPS) started by American mathematicians Paul Zeitz and Richard Rusczyk follows the Pedagogy - If it's not struggling, you're not learning.
In the program, the teachers, while facilitating, withhold explanation and let students grapple with problems. In many cases, students never solve the problem, but whenever they do, it's a discovery for them; it's a synthesis of new knowledge. This knowledge becomes a prized possession for the entire life. But when we do not create such opportunities, we deprive students of being the owners of science and maths.
Schools in India are moving away from rote learning to understanding-based learning. Teachers make an effort to make students understand the concepts by making them lucid and clear. However, the new beginning of understanding-based learning should be ventured with caution. The objective should be uncovering the concepts through the student's mind where the mind is involved actively, challenged and made to struggle.
At age 5, Einstein's father gave him a simple magnetic compass when he was bedridden with illness. Young Albert was mesmerised that the needle moved with no visible force. He kept asking, “Why does the needle move? What invisible thing is at work?” He wrestled with the idea of unseen forces for years.
This obsession matured into his lifelong inquiry into fields, relativity, and the structure of space-time. If someone had given him a clear explanation of a magnetic compass, who knows, the world may not have seen his path-breaking work on relativity. Einstein didn't accept the first “clear explanation.” He kept evaluating each answer, probing for hidden assumptions—an early display of critical thinking.
Marie Curie grew up in Russian-occupied Poland, where formal higher education for women was banned. Curie joined the secret Flying University, where students taught each other through debate, questioning, and experiment. Without lectures, she had to extract meaning from raw sources and collaborative inquiry. She questioned experimental results and refined methods—hallmarks of learning by struggle and questioning.
The list of scientists who learnt by struggle and questioning is endless. Quite appreciably, schools in India are making efforts in moving towards understanding-based learning, but we must not take pride in making lesson plans that take away students' struggle.
Simple approaches like withholding explanation, allowing students to find flaws in the explanation and giving students a challenging problem but an unlimited time to solve will do wonders. If schools replace rote with only lucid explanation, we risk giving students clarity without depth. Explanations may light the path, but it is struggle that makes students walk it. This walking is what creates thinkers and scientists.
(Abhishek Kariwal is co-founder www.opendooreducation.in. Email him at abhishek@opendooreducation.in)
Published - September 30, 2025 07:24 pm IST
Source: The Hindu
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