As students, we have always felt that the Indian education system is a strange beast. A beast which has more disadvantages than unknown advantages.
Read the previous sentence again and focus on the word “unknown”. We have always cursed the Indian education system to the core. We have had ideas of how to change the Indian education system. We might have discussed those ideas with someone in the government. But, as students, we have never looked at it from a different point of view.
If something good happens, the system is good.
If something bad happens, the system was always bad.
That is how we have always thought.
Whenever I ask someone to tell me the good points/ pros of our education system, they laugh and say, “Kuch accha ho toh batau na (only if there are any good things)”.
So, as you read this blog, I will help you to see it from a different point of view. You might not agree with me, but it will definitely make you think.
India has a population of over a billion people, the majority being youth. And, in the coming few years, India is going to have the largest young population in the world.
Where does the education system fit here?
According to reports in 2014, India had about 315 million students. Considering the trend, India should have about 400 million students as of today.
This creates Competition. A Fierce Competition.
Every year, about 10 lakh (1 million) students give the IITJEE exams out of which only 10,000 (approximately) are selected. Apart from that, institutes like BITS, FMS, AIIMS, IIMs etc accommodate very few students every year. In short, there are only a few top spots available and almost half a billion students competing for it (a lot of countries have less population than the number of students in India)
And how are students judged in this competition? Marks.
While I don’t like that the competition is for marks, because marks are all that decide your qualifications; I do like that because of this discord, students are trained to compete like no one else. So, the first advantage of our education system is that,
Indian students Thrive Under Pressure!
Everyone wants to score the highest and get that first rank. Everyone competes for it and the best one wins. It’s as simple as that. Those who don’t work hard are filtered out and the rest are rewarded for their efforts. With more pressure, the capacity to learn increases.
This pressure exerted on students gets them to do more work in less time, increase productivity and develop multiple skills at the same time just so that they can stand out in the crowd.
Large pressure may be a disadvantage but there are proven adverse effects of it. And that is an advantage that our education system provides us with.
Although our system is based on rote learning, it gives a lot of knowledge. I am against the system being based on rote learning but it is definitely an advantage.
Rote learning is mainly required in schools where there is a lot of theoretical syllabus. A lot of people might ask, “Why is theoretical knowledge an advantage?”, “Shouldn’t there be more practical teaching?”. From a students perspective, remembering dates of history may not be very important. But in science, maths and a lot of other subjects, it is very important.
This theoretical knowledge is the very base of conducting research. To prove anything, we require a combination of theoretical results and practical results. Without theory, there is no practical and vice versa.
Rote learning is required because of the number of subjects we study. It is not possible to understand each and every subject. We might understand the concepts and history behind the subjects that interest us, and that is completely okay. But, when we learn a lot of these subjects, we acquire a lot of knowledge about everything.
How does this help? A 16-year-old student, with hardly any exposure to the real world, has to decide what he wants to do for the rest of his life based on what he has learnt over the years. Our education system provides us with knowledge of each and everything and that makes it neither very easy nor very difficult to decide. Practical knowledge would help but it is not the only option.
Also, rote learning works until maybe the 10th grade but not after that, at least in the Science stream. Being a science student, I can tell you with confidence that it is almost impossible to score well without understanding the concepts. I believe that it’s wrong to generalize that our education system is completely based on rote learning.
Our system enables us to acquire a great deal of knowledge.
How to apply that knowledge remains to be taught, but as they say, Well Begun is Half Done.
Some people say that our education system completely disregards the individuality of a child. Does it really do that? According to me, it does that to an extent but it is something that our country relies on.
Think from the perspective of the government. Whichever party comes into power, they have the responsibility of educating almost half a billion people at a time.
Let’s consider the western countries with which we always compare our education system. In western countries, population is not a concern. In order to judge any system of a country, does not always have to be the education system, you have to consider a lot of factors. The available resources, population to resources ratio and a lot of other factors. These countries have excellent existing setups to create an amazing education system. They can easily plan theoretical, practical, skill-based, creative — every aspect of learning. And they also have a population that is willing to absorb it all in. All these countries don’t have the burden of poverty and healthcare which would affect the provision of educational opportunities.
The aim of our government is to improve the literacy rate of the country. Their aim is to first make basic education available to all. And that is happening gradually. For those having problems with the current education system, they have the option of private schools which may be based on the western education system.
While urban areas have a good penetration of schools and colleges, that same level of awareness has not yet reached the rural areas — and the majority population of India resides in villages and small towns.
So what’s the solution? Establish a system providing basic education first. Get people to enrol their children into schools first. At least let them gain some theoretical knowledge. Skills will be taken care of later.
We all know that not every child is born to become an engineer or an accountant or a doctor or to do some other white-collar job. Some are talented enough and destined to become artists, sportspersons or musicians or actors. But, are those the most important professions? Will they provide jobs to millions of young Indians graduating every year? Simply put, no!
We don’t need millions of artists or sportspersons. But we do need millions of engineers and accountants to do the jobs that our economy creates and also to do the job of creating other jobs.
With an increase in companies setting up their call centres and manufacturing units in India, are we prepared to provide the workforce to them? Absolutely, yes! Thanks to our education system that produces millions of engineers and doctors and accountants every year.
Also, because of the manpower we have here, India is one of the largest outsourcing destinations in the world.
Our education system promotes hard work. This hard work has led so many Indians to win Nobel Prizes and managing world-class organisations like Google and Microsoft.
I feel that our education system is better than the western education system at least in this one aspect. And that is Merit.
In India, you get admitted to colleges based on how you score in your entrance exams. Higher you score, better college or university you get into. Although judging students only on the basis of marks is not justified, I believe that this makes our system more transparent.
So many people criticize the IITJEE, NEET examinations and think that it is unfair. These are the people who crib when they don’t score well in their entrances. They demand a better education system with a more practical approach and a personality plus merit-based selection. But isn’t that the system for admission into western universities?
Let’s take an example of applying to any western university. Although there are entrances like the GRE, GMAT, SATs etc. your admission also depends on your statement of purpose, projects done, research conducted, patents drafted and laurels won. While all these are fair parameters to judge a student, at the end of the day, they are subjective. The scoring is variant and not fixed. Even with the best profile, you might not get selected and you will never be able to get an answer to why you were not selected and why someone else not better than you were selected.
You may be brilliant and have high accomplishments & still not get selected in Harvard or MIT and you won’t be able to reason why. It will haunt you forever. But if you don’t get selected in IIT or AIIMS, at least you will know the reason.
This transparency is what I love about our education system.
As I mentioned in the beginning, the Indian education system is a strange beast. It really is.
It seems to be proficient at making students more competitive, adaptable, hardworking, target-oriented and sometimes even smarter.
But it fails in turning students into “People”.
Indian students don’t swim around freely in a pool of possibilities. They are rather forced to stand in queues. Each queue leading to a tested career path that is assumed to be worth pursuing. Every student stands in this queue, pushing against each other and fighting to get ahead. And getting ahead is all that matters. This is all that you are taught to do.
You learn how to do this each and every day — pushing and jumping and struggling in your narrow queue but at the same time, unaware of vast open pools surrounding your queue.
One day, you push ahead and actually get good at fighting. There comes a day when you are standing ahead of the queue, delighted. Not because you reached somewhere you wanted to go but because you fought and beat everyone else to the front of the queue.
Being able to think freely, expressing your ideas and teaching you how to educate yourself should be the aim of any education system. The Indian system fails to do all three.
Here’s a story of my life.
As a child, I always made it in the front of the queue. I always had to be top of the class, be the best at sports, at writing, at speaking. Basically, at everything. I stayed in the front consistently because somehow, that was always the goal.
So, by the time I finished my 10th grade, I was soaring high. Always pretty much in front of the queue. But then I fell and fell hard. For the first time, I was not in the front of the queue. And there came a point when I was thrown out of the queue and first time into the pool of possibilities. The pool at which I only looked at sometimes inside of the queue.
This pool, you might have figured it out by now, is the pool of your interests. This pool is another queue, but this queue is the one that takes you where you want to reach.
Something happened one day and I stood up for the first time and questioned what I wanted to do with my life. Now that there was no queue to beat, or rather, there is no queue to beat, I actually think of things I loved doing.
It took me a long time (about 4 years) and a hard failure to realize what I actually wanted in life. Isn’t it terrible that I realized my purpose only when I failed as a student? That’s what education is supposed to help with. Isn’t it?
We are not trained to be on a path that assures success. We are trained to be on a path that alleviates failure. The standard paths with minimum amounts of risks.
My first failure taught me that it is not where my education takes me that I liked, but it is the winning feeling.
This is the case with most of the Indian students. We like to win. We like to compare ourselves. And that is what keeps us going. We never stop and think if we even want to play this game as long as we are winning.
Our education system is good at making winners out of learners. That is why so many Indians work at high positions in top tech companies and the big four.
But it is the student who has to decide whether he/she wants to win at the game that the system and everyone else is playing or he/she wants to join a game he/she actually enjoys playing.
If I had never gotten thrown out of that queue, I would never have had the urgency and the time to contemplate on what I wanted in life.
The good part is that you have trained to become a winner but the bad part is that you are expected to win at a very narrow, pre-determined set of games.
The rat race created by the Indian education system is its biggest disadvantage.
Education is not about marks. They matter, Yes!
Education is all about preparing the future population of our country for the challenges they may face. Education needs to equip us, not only with facts, but also skills. Not only with memory, but also ability.
If you teach a child how to use a gun, he/she will use a gun.
If you teach a child how to use his mind, he/she will use his/her mind.
To conclude, you still might have not agreed with my point of view. But isn’t it something worth giving a thought?
There is no ideal system. A near to an ideal education system would not only impart knowledge, but also cultivate wisdom. Knowledge will follow while wisdom is inherent.
No system is superior or inferior in the way it delivers. It is all about the individual. At the end of the day, the systems are put in place just to direct our thinking, and it is the individual who has to put a step forward for developing his or her skills.
BE A WINNER.
BUT CHOOSE YOUR GAME WISELY!
These pictures are from my 3-day visit to Andhari Primary School in Andhari Village in Gujarat. Let’s build together a better future for these kids.
