Md. Tabrej Director
Dept. of Business Administration. St. Joseph’s College, Jakhama.
Education has been a problem in our country and lack of it has been blamed for all sorts of evil for hundreds of years. Even Rabindranath Tagore wrote lengthy articles about how Indian education system needs to change; funny thing is that from the colonial times, few things have changed. We have established IITs, IIMs and other institution of excellence; students now routinely score 90%+ percentage and many finds it difficult to get into the colleges of their choices; but we still do more of the same stuff.
Rote learning still plagues our system, most of the students are studying only to score marks in exams. The colonial masters introduced education system in India to create clerks and civil servants, and we have not deviated from that pattern till today. If there are few centres of educational excellences, for each of those there are thousands of mediocre and terrible schools, colleges and now even universities that do not meet even the minimum standards. If things have changed a little bit somewhere, elsewhere things have sunk into further inertia, corruption and lack of ambition. A crisis is – we are in a country where people are spending their parent’s life saving and borrowed money on education and even then not getting standard education and students struggling to find employment of their choice. Because of this, in our country, millions of students every year are becoming victims of an unrealistic, pointless, mindless rat race. The mind numbing competition and rote learning do not only crush the creativity of millions of students in our country but it also drives brilliant students to commit suicide.
We also live in a country where the people see education as the means of climbing the social and economic ladder. If the education system is falling- then it is certainly not due to lack of demand for good education or because of a market for education does not exist. Education system in India is falling because of more intrinsic reasons. There are systematic faults that do not let our demand for good education translate into a great marketplace with excellent education services.
What should change in Indian Education System?
• Re-define the purpose of the education system: Our education system is still a colonial education geared towards generating babus and pen-pushers under the newly acquired skin of modernity. We may have the most number of engineering graduates in the world, but that certainly has not translated into much technological innovation here, rather many are busy running the call centres of the rest of the world- that is where the engineering skills end.
• Focus on skilled based education: Our education system is geared towards teaching and testing knowledge at every level as opposed to teaching skills. “Give a man a fish and you feed him one day, teach him how to catch fishes and you feed him for lifetime”. Knowledge is largely forgotten after the semester is over. Still year after year our system made students to focus on cramming information.
• Reward Creativity and Innovation: Our education system rarely rewards what deserves highest academic accolades. Deviance is discouraged. Risk taking is mocked. Our testing and marking systems need to be built to recognise creativity, problem solving, research and innovation.
Memorising is not learning; the biggest flaw in our education system is perhaps that it incentivizes memorising above creativity and innovation.
• Implement technological infrastructure for education: India needs to embrace internet and technology if it has to teach all of its huge population, the majority of which is located in remote villages. Now that we have computers and internet, it makes sense to invest in technological infrastructure that will make access to knowledge easier than ever. We need to create educational delivery mechanism that can actually take the wealth of human knowledge to the masses. The tools for this dissemination will be cheap smart phones, tablets and computers with internet connection, while all these are becoming more possible than ever before, there is lot of innovation yet to take place in this space.
• Take mediocrity out of the system: Our Education system today encourages mediocrity- in students, in teachers, throughout the system. It is easy to survive as a mediocre student or as a mediocre teacher in an educational institution. No one shuts down a mediocre college or mediocre school. Hard work is always tough; the path to excellence is fraught with difficulties. Mediocrity is comfortable. Our education system will remain sub-par or mediocre until we make it clear that it is not okay to be mediocre. If we want excellence, mediocrity cannot be tolerated.
• Personalize education- one size does not fit all: Indian education system is built on the presumption that if something is good for one kid, it is good for all kids. Some kids learn faster, some are comparatively slow. Some people are visual learners, others are audio learners and still some others learn faster from experience. If one massive monolithic education system has to provide education to everyone, then there is no option but to assume that one size fits all (which is totally wrong). If however we can effectively decentralise education and if government did not obsessively control what would be the syllabus and what will be the method of instruction, there could be an explosion of new and innovative courses geared towards serving very niches of learners.
For example, the market for learning dancing. There are very different forms that attract students with different tastes. More importantly, different teachers and institutes have developed different ways of teaching dancing. This could never happen if there was a central board of dancing education which enforced strict standards of what will be taught and how such things are to be taught. Central regulation kills choices and stifles innovation too.
Conclusion: Education is an important aspect of our lives, while some of us take it for granted. It is high time now, that all the stake holders should come together to correct it and to make it a commendable system. Until and unless we correct our education system, where the future of the society is nurtured, we will not develop as a country.
“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” -Albert Einstein.
