Editor’s note – This article comes from a college student based in Chennai. The author talks about the high esteem the society holds for our education system and how this perception is ultimately untrue and provides reasons for this argument.
Author’s note – This is my take on how the society views our education system and the starkly contrasting reality. Our education system is shitty and I dedicate this article to the absent sanity of all those people who’re in denial about it.
How does our society perceive the quality of our education system and what criteria does it use to do that? From what I’ve observed, I note that there is a direct relationship between the pressure on the students, time and effort put in by the students, their hard work and the quality of education as perceived not only by our lay society but also by the majority of our educators, students and parents. In other words, everyone here simply thinks that just because our education system is pressurizing us and making us do shitloads of work and is being strict with us, it is doing a good job.
Generally in our society factors such as the rigorousness of education, the hard work that the students put in and competitiveness are mistaken as indicators for the quality of education. It clearly makes sense when you think in a linear fashion. Surely these things make a better educated individual out of the student right? No! The truth is a bit more subtle and complicated than that. I’ll give you an analogy - even a rickshaw puller works hard, has tremendous pressures on his shoulders, puts in great amounts of time and effort, aims to take his family towards financial security and other goodness. But that doesn’t make him great or an epitome of success or even educated. The truth is that there are other things required to be truly exceptional, efficient and functional at the fullest capacity. The rat race and filtering mechanism that our education system is doesn’t complete the students; i.e. it doesn’t help them in attaining their fullest intellectual/creative/emotional potential. All it does is filter out those that endure in qualifying the rules of the game…the game at the end of which lies the supposed salvation of the average Indian student – a safe job with a good salary package. This game doesn’t genuinely train students for functionality let alone excellence.
In my opinion, the effectiveness of an education system should be measured by taking in such factors as the productive intellectual output of the graduates, the patents they create, their level of contribution to events/causes that affect the globe, their discoveries, inventions and things of that nature. Let’s face it, contemporary post-independence India has barely had any epitomes of internationally laudable individual success that was attained basically due to the education received entirely in India. What about Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam? What about Narayana Murthy? What about other nameless exceptional Indians who’ve contributed to our nation’s growth through their exceptional work? In my humble opinion, there have only been great Indians in the contemporary post-independence India who come up despite their education in India. And those men and women are people of exceptionality. In any rate we are not producing enough competent persons. We’re not capitalizing on the raw talent available in our country.
We have more than a billion people in our country and of it nearly 50% are youth – the largest such national reserve anywhere in the world. And of those millions, a few million have the privilege of getting education and of those few million, a few hundred thousand go for higher education as minimum as college. And what happens to these few hundred thousand people? A majority of them get converted into IT workers who get paid for doing others’ jobs for them in the background. And the society on the whole is actually proud of having done such a mediocre job on these young minds. Why is this mediocre you ask? What the hell happened to those people who are capable of producing revolutionary ideas? What happened to their creative potential? A person doesn’t have to go through IIT-JEEs or such rigorous knowledge-testing examinations to be able to express his/her creativity and I would say that much of Indians today are creatively anaemic despite the fact that anyone can be creatively productive. What I’m implying is that if our system didn’t smother their creativity and didn’t inhibit actual learning and didn’t avoid such effective methods as trial & error and experiential knowledge, they would turn out more productive and efficient than they are now. My argument is that our potential is much higher than what we’re achieving right now and this gap is much due to the debilitatingly poor quality of education that these young minds receive.
Also it has to be noted that the education system doesn’t operate on sound principles. Its “artificial” rules aren’t grounded in sound reality in a way that would help the educated individuals take on the challenges and problems that the real world scenario in our country faces such as need for creative individuals, diverse experts who can develop pioneering authority in their fields, thinkers, innovators, visionaries, leaders etc. In the state it is in now, our education system cannot even produce employable youth let alone intentionally create and mould visionaries. In fact, if I had to put my opinion of the state of our education system in one word, I would use the word ‘pathetic’.
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