EDUCATION SYSTEM – PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS

Education is the foundation of any country’s economy. A country where the education system is not in place, lags in every way. The same thing is happening in our country India. India as a country faces many problems in the educational system. Today we are going to list down some of the problems that we have identified in our education system.

“Rattafying”or the rote learning process – this Hinglish word easily define the state of Indian education system. Students in our education system are compelled to rote learn in order to score high marks. The system sadly does not focus on strengthening and clearing the concepts.

Insufficient Infrastructure— poor infrastructure & lack of facilities are reasons for the low turnout of students in schools. Students, especially girls, do not prefer to go to schools.Basic necessities, such as clean and hygienic drinking water and separate toilets for boys and girls, are not available in many of the school, even in urban India

Teacher selection criteria– in most of our schools the teacher’s selection& recruitment process is non-merit based. They are selected as per the choice of selectors.Lack of proper academic qualifications and competency in pedagogy are another challenge.

Poor Teacher-student ratio – Huge no. of students in a class are tackled by a single teacher, which leads to less focus on each child. In addition, students are not encouraged to ask questions or clarify their doubts.

Shortage of training— no or very less emphasis is given to teacher training in our schools. This is a major reason why our teachers are not aware of new developments in the field of education.

No emphasis on creativity— our education system focuses on quantity rather than quality. Getting high marks by hook or crook is the only aim of the students; they are not bothered about conceptual understanding or developing critical and creative thinking. This restricts the growth of their mind.

These are some issues, that our educational system is facing nowadays, which need to be resolved and removed from our system. If not completely, then at least some percentage of it can be removed by opening schools which focus on providing progressive quality education to students.

If merit-based teacher selection, output-oriented study, concept clarity of students are treated as important factors,  then we can think of bringing change in our education system. Opening schools where the focus is on providing an excellent education to students will ease the course of action. However, opening a school is not an easy job at all.

You need many things like funds, land, getting approvals from authorities, designing architecture, expertise to create curriculum, etc. Not all these expert knowledge is available with a single person. School Consultancy service plays an important role in this tricky situation. Shri Educare is one such organization, which will help you in realizing the dream of opening such a school.

Shri Educare’s team of experts will help you right from conceptualizing your plan to financial viability and feasibility, to finally launching and operating a school that provides quality and excellence in education. They hold your hands right from the conceptualization stage, safeguarding your investment and time every step of the way. Through in-depth research and constant up gradation of the curriculum with best practices across the world, they provide you with the turn-key support required by you to open preschools and K-12 schools.

Education System

The education system in India suffers from some serious lacunae. These include preference for good marks/grades over being knowledgeable, lack of encouragement for thinking out of the box (asking questions in the class is considered rude and seldom encouraged; almost non-existent practice of extra reading; education restricted to prescribed textbook and help/guide books, and that too limited to 24 hrs. before the examination day!), rigid and outdated syllabi/curriculum, heavily underpaid professors/teachers (bright minds stay away from this career; professors don’t show much zeal for teaching, they just “go through” the motions), only a few colleges with good quality of education where you have to be in the top elite to gain admission besides there being a lack of passion for education in the real sense (most students go for engineering/medicine on the advice of “elders”!).

Now, for some serious facts and stats regarding Indian education system vindicating the aforementioned lacunae (note that these stats are based on those provided by the government of India itself freely on the web):

•In India, just 11% of the children finishing school joins a college whereas in the US, this figure amounts to a whopping 83%.

As per the eleventh plan, to increase this enrolment level to 15%, India needs to invest approx. Rs. 22.5 billion but it has allotted only a fourth of the total needed.

•According to a study by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council, 90% of the colleges and 70% of the universities that the council graded were of middling or poor quality. The standard of school education has stagnated too. In rural India, there is no teaching activity on about 50% of the working days in the primary schools.

•There is an endemic shortage of teachers with even the IITs reporting a 20% to 30% shortfall in faculty. Indian universities, if one goes by average, revise their curricula only once in 5 to 10 years but by then they get defeated in both letter and spirit.

•Corruption is the by-word in higher education having become rampant and institutionalized due to over-regulation by the government and multiplicity of education agencies leading to what else but stagnation in this very vital sector of education.

•The lack of good institutions has seen cut-off percentages for entry into good colleges soar to almost impossible levels (at Delhi’s SRCC college, this percentage was as high as 98.75). There is an undue pressure to do well in the secondary board exams because of which the suicidal tendency has grown alarmingly.

•Owing to poor quality of education at home, Indian students now spend no less than $7000 million to go abroad and study in foreign universities. Still the government is adamant over its peculiar stance of not permitting foreign universities to set up shop in India.

Allow private capital 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 defence. 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 – one of the major examples of this being IIPM.

Allowing profit making will encourage serious entrepreneurs, innovators and investors to take interest in the education sector. The government does not have enough money to provide higher education of reasonable quality to all of us, and it has no excuse to prevent private capital from coming into the educational sector.

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.