Engaging India's next generation

Professor Uday Maitra FRSC, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

India’s chemical and pharmaceutical industries employ a large number of chemists; and the country’s colleges, universities and national institutes offer numerous chemistry undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD programmes. At the same time, a feeling has emerged in both academia and industry, that those taking up chemistry lack solid training in the discipline. It is therefore crucial that we look at the present set-up of chemistry teaching, right from high school.

Chemistry education in India

Indian students usually get exposed to chemistry as a separate subject when, at about age 16, they move from secondary to high school and opt for the science stream. The course content, which is taught over two years, often varies between schools, because high school education is administered by several central and more than 30 individual boards from the 29 states.

Some of these boards have tried – but not succeeded – to bring chemistry teaching and learning closer to real-life chemistry. As a result, many school students say that learning chemistry requires a lot of memorisation and is therefore boring. In my opinion, this is because of several factors, including the teaching of descriptive chemistry without relating it to real-life applications, the lack of facilities to carry out experiments, and the teaching style required to meet examination requirements.

Looking at the current state

The two-year high school chemistry course covers almost all areas of chemistry, but most of it remains highly descriptive, and students need to memorise considerable portions of these topics. Students who decide to study chemistry at university end up studying largely the same topics in more detail. In addition, the focus on finishing a syllabus within a tight timeframe means that teachers often have little time to engage students in creative thinking or to relate the taught content to our everyday lives.

Many schools in India lack the facilities to carry out extensive practical experiments. But even in schools that have the necessary set-up and funds, these are often limited to teaching experiments that have little relation to scientific research and applications. While learning techniques such as acid-base titrations, salt analysis or organic functional group analysis is useful, the routine nature of the laboratory experiments make them rather uninteresting. The nature of these experiments leaves little room for students to explore reactions and principles in an imaginative manner.

The result is that even many good students are not attracted towards continuing studies chemistry. At workshops for high school students I have heard first hand that chemistry is not taught in a systematic manner and was mostly focused on memorising facts instead of providing context. One student commented on the lack of practical experiments, saying that “the subject could be made more interesting by doing more interesting experiments”. Another said: “Chemistry needs to be taught in a more interactive manner, and should not solely test memory skills. Demonstrations and visually stimulating experiments related to the concepts being taught can motivate many students to look at chemistry as a viable career option.”

What can we do to improve?

Learning and teaching chemistry can be a lot of fun. This is something we must not forget when we create the syllabus and structure for a two-year high school course. In our interactions with students, we must start by telling them about the importance of chemistry in everyday life to enable them to make the connection between what they learn and everything around us right at the beginning.

We should also look at providing classroom demonstrations that can be done without the need for specialist glassware and chemicals but still excite students about the subject. It is true that many schools in India do not have adequate funds to run laboratory experiments, but they could greatly benefit from switching to microscale laboratory experiments using simple, inexpensive glass and plastic apparatus.

The use of electronic media as a supplement should also be explored where possible, as they offer the option of, for example, exploring practical chemistry through videos or online experiments.

Finally, I believe that the time has come to recognise that it is not necessary to pack every topic into the two year programme, but instead to allow students to learn fewer topics well. Examinations should test students’ knowledge and understanding, not their ability to memorise reactions and equations!  And by establishing ways to strengthen the links between high schools and chemists in industry and academia, we could not only showcase job opportunities in the chemical sciences, but also engage students with a variety of applications of what they have learnt.

We will need the efforts of our whole community to work out the best way to overcome some of these issues to put in place a broad, yet effective high school education in chemistry that will provide students with the necessary knowledge and skills that will directly benefit industry and academia in the years to come.