What do we need to change about the Indian Education System?
Education has been a problem in our country and
lack of it has been blamed for all sorts of evil for hundreds of years. Even
Rabindranath Tagore wrote lengthy articles about how Indian education system
needs to change. Funny thing is that from the colonial times, few things
have changed. We have established IITs, IIMs, law schools and other
institutions of excellence; students now routinely score 90% marks so that even
students with 90+ percentage find it difficult to get into the colleges of
their choice; but we do more of the same old stuff.
Rote learning still plagues our system, students
study only to score marks in exams, and sometimes to crack exams like IIT JEE,
AIIMS or CLAT. The colonial masters introduced education systems in India to
create clerks and civil servants, and we have not deviated much from that
pattern till today. If once the youngsters prepared en masse for civil services
and bank officers exams, they now prepare to become engineers. If there are a
few centres of educational excellence, for each of those there are thousands of
mediocre and terrible schools, colleges and now even universities that do not
meet even minimum standards. If things have changed a little bit somewhere,
elsewhere things have sunk into further inertia, corruption and lack of
ambition.
Creating a few more schools or allowing hundreds
of colleges and private universities to mushroom is not going to solve the
crisis of education in India. And a crisis it is – we are in a country where
people are spending their parent’s life savings and borrowed money on education
– and even then not getting standard education, and struggling to find
employment of their choice. In this country, millions of students are victim of
an unrealistic, pointless, mindless rat race. The mind numbing competition and
rote learning do not only crush the creativity and originality of millions of
Indian students every year, it also drives brilliant students to commit
suicide.
We also live in a country where the people
see education as the means of climbing the social and economic ladder. If the
education system is failing – then it is certainly not due to lack of demand
for good education, or because a market for education does not exist.
