The Great Indian Education System

I knew of a guy named Jon from the mainland. He had moved to the western world for pursuing his graduate studies. He was quite wary of being in untested waters but braced the idea with grit. He was doing just fine at the start of the academic career, as is the case with everyone, it takes time to get acclimatised.

I happened to call him few weeks back thinking he would have settled down and this is what I found out. He was lately feeling super elated. His morale and self-confidence had got a high boost due to his positive thoughts and way of thinking which led to building up of constructive ideas amongst his peers. For every workshop, group discussion he seemed to know the way to go about the solution. He realised that everyone in his class had a way of representing the solution differently. The approaches differed but everyone conveyed quite the same, real gist of what the prof was looking for. At the end of the day, wherein they all had been graded and everyone had scored decently, he noticed one striking difference. He realised that none of his mates were bothered about acing it or faring not so great. They were rather more curious and excited to know how their mates thought of a certain approach and how did they come up with such an idea. They discussed theory, their application and how it was used in backing their concept and that was a wonderful feeling. He realised that THIS is knowledge sharing and developing. Something he had been lacking from the time he knew education. He understood that students perform their best when grades aren’t a judging parameter or made a prestige issue in the society. Exams are to test the readiness of the student’s thinking power and not rote power and even if it is not quite up to the mark, it is a parameter for the academic mentor to guide the pupil in ways one learns to express. Hence, exams were never considered a stress factor.

This got me thinking about the ground realities in education sector in India. A growing up kid always excels in some or the other form of skill, it ranges right from oratory skill to performing arts. All the ward needs is the correct guidance and exposure to fine tune this skill. This very well can turn out to be the bread earner for family when he grows up. But regardless of that, we judge all the students with the same parameter and bombard everyone with the same subjects and expect them to cope up at the same rate.

Thus starts the rat race to be an ‘achiever’ from the start. Some make it, some obviously don’t but results are panned out instantly like hot pies to judge them academically and expose their flaws. So starts the vicious circle of mad expectations from the teachers, family to over perform and constant belittling the child on the effort made. The pressure to always be on the top and perform well takes the sheen out of what a child’s true potential lies in. The talent is conveniently side-lined and never touched upon. Very few just end up getting lucky even in this horrific system that they not only realise what they’re good at but also stick with it throughout their life, playing it their own way. Majority of the lot remain quite clueless even after graduation about what we’re meant to excel in and what exactly is our calling? Our aptitude and interests never get addressed at the right time, when it should have been for optimum results. Hence, career build up is always difficult in India because by the time we realise our passions, we’ve either graduated in a different subject or we’ve just invested way too much of money, time, energy into some other field where we have lost our voice. It doesn’t help that our mentors are all trained into this drill of feeding us academics and extracting answer sheets out of us semester after semester for years.

Someday I’d like to see this change for the better and oust this illogical methodical “learning” process. An approach where students are honoured according to their strengths and not demeaned just because they can’t fare well in Science or Math; A system where we finally respect the fact that every student is different and more emphasis is laid on choice based credits system where the reach of subjects is expanded and not limited to only conventional fields but encompassing all spheres be it sports, performing arts, business, literature, archaeology, travel, scuba diving. We can excel by leaps if we start early and given the right push. Let the imagination and creativity of a child unfurl and these same wonders of the country will rise to raise the toast!

A whole universe waits for us to be explored; we shouldn’t be wasting this moment by being tucked under the same books year after year. Although, the system has faults in it but we don’t, we’re meant to soar. We aren’t bound together by system; the system was bound together for us. Once you realise this, you’ll set free on your conquest of what you’re destined to excel for.

To end this philosophical saga, I quote a song  called 'The Scientist' by Chris Martin.

I was just guessing
At numbers and figures
Pulling the puzzles apart

Questions of science
Science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart