Critical Analyses on Indian Education Today

Article Analysis (Indian Education System: What needs to change?)

India has had a very old, ancient and a very respectable past with great stories of culture and legends. Ancient India would bring scholars from all over the world to seek knowledge. India was called the golden bird of her time, for far heights of prosperity in science, technology, business, spirituality and humanity and many other fields. But that was a long time ago, today a very different image enters one’s mind of Indian education. Today the most basic and fundamental right, the right to knowledge is hindered by dubious politicians who run the system. A system that is way crossed its expiry date for the time and need of the hour. We need real decisive changes in our practices of providing and enhancing education for India. And one of the major draw backs of our system is that our education is not reaching the individual minds, but tries to conform everyone to the systems need rather than the individual’s. Our education system is geared towards teaching and testing knowledge at every level as opposed to teaching skills. “Give a man a fish and you feed him one day, teach him how to catch fishes and you feed him for a lifetime.” I believe that if you teach a man a skill, you enable him for a lifetime. Knowledge is largely forgotten after the semester exam is over. Still, year after year Indian students focus on cramming information. The best crammers are rewarded by the system. This is one of the fundamental flaws of our education system. Our education system rarely rewards what deserves highest academic honors. Eccentricity is discouraged. Risk taking is mocked. Our testing and marking systems need to be built to recognize original contributions, in form of creativity, problem solving, valuable original research and innovation. If we could do this successfully Indian education system would have changed overnight. Memorizing is no learning; the biggest flaw in our education system is perhaps that it incentivizes memorizing above originality. We need to redefine what education means to us, as a people. Our education system is still a colonial education system geared towards generating babus and pen-pushers under the newly acquired skin of modernity. We may have the most number of engineering graduates in the world, but that certainly has not translated into much technological innovation here. Rather, we are busy running the call centers of the rest of the world – that is where our engineering skills end.
The goal of our new education system should be to create entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, scientists, thinkers and writers who can establish the foundation of a knowledge based economy rather than the low-quality service provider nation that we are turning into. Our rigid form of education from colonial rulers in the big picture hasn’t really worked. More alternatives must make way for new models of education, find attempts to personalize the educational experience with the teacher and the student. Indian education system is built on the presumption that if something is good for one kid, it is good for all kids. Some kids learn faster, some are comparatively slow. Some people are visual learners, others are auditory learners, and still some others learn faster from experience. If one massive monolithic education system has to provide education to everyone, then there is no option but to assume that one size fits all. If however, we can effectively decentralize education, and if the government did not obsessively control what would be the “syllabus” and What will be the method of instruction, there could be an explosion of new and innovative courses geared towards serving various niches of learners,
Central regulation kills choice, and stifles innovation too. As far as education is concerned, availability of choices, de-regulation, profitability, entrepreneurship and emergence of niche courses are all inter-connected.
Allow Private entrepreneurs to invest in education, “The government cannot afford to provide higher education to all the people in the country. It is too costly for the government to do so. The central government spends about 4% of budget expenditure on education, compared to 40% on defense. Historically, the government just did not have enough money to spend on even opening new schools and universities”, forget overhauling the entire system and investing in technology and innovation related to the education system. Still, until today, at least on paper only non-profit organizations are allowed to run educational institutions apart from government institutions. Naturally, the good money, coming from honest investors who want to earn from honest but high impact businesses do not get into education sector. Rather, there are crooks, money launderers and politicians opening “private” educational institutions which extract money from the educational institution through creative structuring. The focus is on marketing rather than innovation or providing great educational service.
And finally, reservation in education, we have reservation today because education is not available universally. Education has to be rationed. This is not a long –term solution. If we want to emerge as a country build on a knowledge economy, driven by highly educated people – we need to make good education so universally available that reservation will lose its meaning.
There is no reservation in online education – because it scales. Today top universities worldwide are taking various courses online, and today you can easily attend a live class taught by a top professor of Harvard University online if you want, no matter which country is belong to. This is the future, this is the easy way to beat reservation and make it inconsequential.

In short we are not where we want to be. When we can define what education means to us, than we can assess or evaluate what it means to each one of us, “An external examination is only one point in time that may reflect many factors, and it also may not take into account areas of personal and social development or the individual strengths a child has.” An exam is just a piece of paper, how are evaluations conducted by exams really reflecting intelligence and the potential and capability of the student? Education must mean a lot more than a grade or score. Education must be the key for one’s happiness. This subjectivity of realizing what makes one happy should bring diversity and most importantly curiosity in the field of education.
I would like to quote a line from the founding father/ inspirer of my school, Sri K. Padmanabha Menon on what he thought education meant.
“There is a latent push in any man which is only a search for perfection. Rightly pursued, one finds this in one’s real nature through the atmosphere between the real teacher and the taught. Education is only an attempt towards this.”