Editor’s note – This article comes from a Delhiite. The author talks about the narrow trends in careers and how the choice of a career is forced on the children. Then comes the argument about the essentially misleading nature of the competition that one has to endure in order to get into the top institutes. The author feels that real science is murdered in India. Also the topic of lack of productive output in our institutes is touched upon.
Author’s Note – I reside in Delhi, and I am aspiring to become an IT professional. Throughout my life I have had a pretty good academic record, but still I am dissatisfied with the quality of education I have received here in India. And this article is my statement on the trends of our country and the need to shift our focus from meaningless competition to real and productive output.
Anyway, this process of bringing out the engineer in the children starts right after they are done with class X (these days some start it at a point as early as class VI). Parents start searching for the “best” coaching institutes available; which is another way of referring to the institutes that generated the maximum number of IITians in the previous year! The coaching institutes charge a premium, and there starts the process of manufacture of the prestigious engineers of this great country. For the next two years the student’s life is burdened with 6 or more daily hours of school, 4 hours of coaching and obviously to get through top engineering colleges of the huge country they'd have to add another 2-3 hours of self-study everyday; and by self-study I mean "memorizing" the unlimited facts, formulas that have no practical use whatsoever. These two years make the student’s life hell; they have to go through sleepless nights, compromise on their hobbies and interests etc. All they can do is memorize from fat books, competing with 10 lakh other Indian students, fighting for one of those few thousand seats available in the top institutes.
After reading what I’ve written so far one might get a feeling that I am against hard work, but I am not. What I am trying to ask is that even after taking so much pain, is anyone learning anything productive? No, certainly not. All this is done merely with the intention to get good marks in the state board/CBSE examinations and clear entrances. Real interest to learn something productive is not imbibed in the students. In those two years, anyone can lose their enthusiasm for the most interesting subjects like physics, forget where math is used in real life and fail to realize how easy life has become because of the chemical inventions. They end up mindlessly solving the numerical problems, completing chemical equations in the examination hall and cursing their decision to take PCM in class XI. Overall, my point is that in India, "real" science has been murdered.
If you still haven't got my point of being against all this coaching culture or the engineering trend, allow me to explain. So, have you ever wondered why the most precious of technologies are imported from abroad? Why all the big and pioneering researches are done at MIT and Harvard and not at IIT? Why India isn’t self-sufficient in technology despite the number of engineers being produced every year? Why we cannot invent new products? Why iPad, Facebook, Microsoft, LED TV's, high speed broadband all come from abroad not from India? Is this the quality of engineers being produced by so called prestigious institutes of India? What an Indian engineer does is work for big companies, providing a form of cheap labor for them. Recently, an IITian got a placement at Facebook and it made news as if he had created something better than Facebook! Just check out science magazines, journals or newspapers, you'll see news of researches, inventions being conducted at top global colleges. All the gadgets, technology have seen a magnificent shift in a short duration of time and obviously homegrown Indians have had very little to contribute in all of this. And on the top of all this, the education department of India feels they are doing a great job, they feel Indian education is the best in the world! IITs are equivalent to MITs they feel. Yes, I have heard people say such stuff!
We need to move out of classrooms, quit the chalk and talk theory and start spending some more time in laboratories. All concepts of physics and chemistry should be demonstrated in laboratory to get a better understanding. If that is not possible, at least demonstrate it through visuals by preparing high-quality videos. Develop a system where innovation and creativity holds higher importance than marks and drudgery. Make students understand the concepts and theories and not memorize them! Develop infrastructure of schools and colleges to keep it at par with today’s technology. Make students enter a world of exploration. It's high time we think about the Indian future, and make necessary changes in our education system to improve the quality of Indian Engineers so that they become the essential inventors of the future.
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