INDIAN EDUCATION SYSTEM:
WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE....?
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, law schools and other institutions of
excellence; students now routinely score
90% marks so that even students with 90+
percentage find it difficult to get into the
colleges of their choice; but we do more
of the same old stuff.
Creating a few more schools or allowing
hundreds of colleges and private
universities to mushroom is not going to
solve the crisis of education in India. And
a crisis it is – we are in a country where
people are spending their parent’s life
savings and borrowed money on
education – and even then not getting
standard education, and struggling to find
employment of their choice. In this
country, millions of students are victim of
an unrealistic, pointless, mindless rat
race. The mind numbing competition and
rote learning do not only crush the
creativity and originality of millions of
Indian students every year, it also drives
brilliant students to commit suicide.
What should change in India education
system? What needs to be fixed at the
earliest? Here is my wish list:
1. Focus on skill 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 a lifetime.” I believe that if
you teach a man a skill, you enable him
for a lifetime. Knowledge is largely
forgotten after the semester exam is over.
Still, year after year Indian students focus
on cramming information. The best
crammers are rewarded by the system.
This is one of the fundamental flaws of
our education system.
2. Reward creativity, original
thinking, research 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
recognize original contributions, in form
of creativity, problem solving, valuable
original research and innovation. If we
could do this successfully Indian
education system would have changed
overnight.
Memorising is no learning; the biggest
flaw in our education system is perhaps
that it incentivizes memorizing above
originality.
3. Get smarter people to teach
For way too long teaching became the
sanctuary of the incompetent. Teaching
jobs are until today widely regarded as
safe, well-paying, risk-free and low-
pressure jobs. Once a teacher told me in
high school “Well, if you guys don’t study
it is entirely your loss – I will get my
salary at the end of the month anyway.”
He could not put across the lack of
incentive for being good at teaching any
better. Thousands of terrible teachers all
over India are wasting valuable time of
young children every day all over India.
4. Education for all possibility
The performance of a teacher
now need not be restricted to a small
classroom. Now the performance of a
teacher can be opened up for the world
to see. The better teacher will be more
popular, and acquire more students.
That’s the way of the future.We need leaders, entrepreneurs in teaching positions, not salaried people trying to hold on to their mantle.
5. Implement massive
technology 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. Instead of
focussing on outdated models of brick and mortar colleges and universities, we need to create educational delivery
mechanisms that can actually take the
wealth of human knowledge to the
masses. The tools for this dissemination
will be cheap smartphones, tablets and
computers with high speed internet
connection. While all these are becoming
more possible than ever before, there is
lot of innovation yet to take place in this
space.
6. Re-define the purpose of the
education system
Our education system is still a colonial
education system 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, we are busy running the call
centres of the rest of the world – that is
where our engineering skills end.
The goal of our new education system
should be to create entrepreneurs,
innovators, artists, scientists, thinkers
and writers who can establish the
foundation of a knowledge based
economy rather than the low-quality
service provider nation that we are
turning into.
7. Personalize education – one
size does not fit all
Assembly line education prepares
assembly line workers. However, the drift of economic world is away from assembly line production. 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 auditory
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.
8. Make reservation irrelevant
We have reservation in education today
because education is not available
universally. Education has to be rationed.
This is not a long –term solution. If we
want to emerge as a country build on a
knowledge economy, driven by highly
educated people – we need to make goodeducation so universally available thatreservation will lose its meaning.
There is noreservation
in online education– because it scales. Today top universities worldwide are taking various courses online, and today you can easily attend a live class taught by a top professor of Harvard University online if you want, no matter which country is belong to. This is the future, this is the easy way to beat reservation and make it inconsequential. What are the most important changes
you want to see in the India education
system? Share your ideas....@ vijithvndd@gmail.com.
