Every year, we see that several students score 100% in their recent school-leaving exams — but the system they belong to is failing miserably. Their perfect scores denote the perfect failure of the education system in India.
It is often loudly expressed that there is a serious lack of quality education institutions in the country. The people who argue about the IITs, IIMs etc are blind to the gravity of this shortage of quality academia.
In school, students get pushed into one end of a disciplinary triangle — ‘Science-Commerce-Humanities’ — right after class 10. It seems that a caste-like system has been wholeheartedly adopted & enforced with students—a system in which science has been anointed top, commerce middle, humanities lowest—killing the whole education in the process.
Absolute routine of unimaginative pedagogy does all to discourage students to visualize:
How history and economics may interlink? Or
How physics and cinema may go hand-in-hand?
Instead, our students are lectured, hectored and coached, but they are not taught—
How to challenge assumptions, make presentations or do group work?
Nothing improves radically in college either. India is at least 50 years behind other countries in educational reforms. We are severely lagging in encouraging among our students:
- Interdisciplinary learning
- Individual thought
- The luxury to learn from mistakes.
Our universities are faring equally badly, as they continue to tunneling our students into highly constricted streams. In the end, we are left with very few quality institutions, which are sought by many thousands of anxious students.
It’s vital we re-examine such narrow education. Just observe the number of students who score 100 each year even in subjects like ‘English’ literature which is highly, essentially very subjective in its own nature. You would need nothing more to illustrate—how mechanical our education actually is.
The system of education is believed to be a good education system, only if it opens the minds of students—to think creatively and logically; if it makes them able to process diverse kinds of knowledge, conflicting thoughts & ideas at the same time.
But here in India, we do the exact opposite, by stitching our students into tight-subjects early on, and then buttoning these subjects with monologue-teaching and objective-type exams. None of this can be justified by adopting the old fixation, namely education must equal jobs. Indeed, the education may pave the route to jobs for students, but is it enough? Or is it the objective? Of course, NOT.
The holistic reason for a sound education system to exist is only one, i.e., to create a society capable of creating jobs, finding solutions and innovating.
Suffocating education suffocates growth simply & amply. Lazy teaching and rote-based themes (contents) severely cuts off the birth of new ideas, new possibilities — and new universities.
It’s essential our pedagogy enters a freer world of what good education is really about.