Raam
and Shyam are two college goers living in an average Indian city.Raam
has represented his school, college and district in basketball. He is
also in his college's debating team and likes to read about and learn
new things and discuss relevant topics. His hobbies include reading,
trekking, philately and playing the guitar. He also teaches poor
children and holds workshops for avid trekkers.Shyam does not read
anything beyond his textbooks or the page 3 news. His hobbies are
limited to watching the latest Bollywood flick and frequenting various
eateries with his friends. He has poor articulation and he is hardly
interested in knowing about new things.
Yet
for the neighbourhood, it is Shyam who is intelligent and a role model
for their children.Because Shyam had scored more marks in 10th and 12th
standard board exams.
That
is the synopsis of Indian edcuation system and the mentality which it
has spawned. It creates Shyams by quintals and megatons and lauds their
"acheivements" on par with the invention of an alternate source of
energy. The Raams on the other hand, are berated for being disinterested
in studies and are goaded to follow the example of Shyams. As a result,
all the Raams either live their life in a quality much lesser than what
their worth is or if they are lucky, get the opportunity to escape this
dystopia to a better place where their individual worth is recognized.
Albert Einstein had said that if you judge a fish's intelligence by its ability to climb trees then it will spend its whole life believing itself to be stupid. And this is what the education system in India is doing, declaring everyone stupid and making them stupid in the name of education, by having a couple of set parameters to gauge the intelligence of a student and branding him or her unfit if he/she fails to meet the set criteria.
Talent
in children has been limited to singing the latest Bollywood songs or
dancing to the same and getting the most marks by mugging and vomitting
the same on the answer sheet. Because basically we are a sick society
that values shallowness over content. When all the houses one sees have
constantly squabbling parents who only shut up during mealtimes, a
father who salivates over some bimbo on screen or a mother who devotedly
watches mind numbing serials and vulgar reality shows, where there are
scores of tabloids and film magazines but no book to be seen then in
such homes the only type of child will be a couch potato who cant add
two and two without a calculator and who cant find France on a map. To
expect some kind of prowress to be born in such a setting is like
expecting a sow to give birth to a cub.
Where
is our desire to make the next inventor, the next scientist, the next
sportsperson (other than cricket), the next entreprenuer, the next
artiste, the next leader? Nowhere. Because the education system
atrophies our brains too much to think of anything beyond pettiness and
mundane issues.
The basic problem with our education system is that intellect is determined by mugging up content and replicating the same instead of thinking of new ideas.What schools should kill is ignorance, doubt, inferiority complex and fear. But what they kill is curiosity and individual worth. They are not the makers of tomorrows generation but the assembly line for producing trivia replicating robots. There is no scope for a child to learn anything that can open his/her mind, develop creativity in him/her, make him/her curious to go beyond the usual and test the limits of whatever has been taught. The student is told again and again to "stick to the syllabus" and not to "use his head too much" as after all, its the exams that matter the most. Has anyone cared to ask what happens to all these toppers in board exams? How many of them become the demigods and saviours that this marklist obsessed society makes them to be? Has anyone cared to notice as to why an overwhelming number of people who make it big werent exactly teacher's pets? As the popular saying goes, the kids on the front row get to answer all the teacher's questions because the back benchers have more pressing issues to attend to.
A
student who asks questions is considered as a nuisance and shouted down
instead of being lauded. Teachers take it as an insult instead of
treating it as an opportunity to add value to their knowledge. But then,
they themselves are by and large are the third products of the third
rate system and as a result, end up killing the best in children,
including their thirst for knowledge and their self respect by
constantly berating them for one thing or another. India being a country
with a skewed set of priorities, major attention in initial stages
of post independence was given in making higher education institutes
while leaving a pittance for basic education. Teachers, the makers of
tomorrow's generation are paid a pittance, which ensures that nothing
but the very incompetent are encouraged to take up this profession. The
least is spent on elementary education, ensuring the worst quality in
each and everything associated with it. The result? One fourth of the
population is unlettered even after close to seven decades after
independence, a fitting consequence of the unpardonable crime we have
committed as a society.
A
bad education system has without any doubt, the worst possible
textbooks.What kind of scientific temprament can a science book arouse
when it is limited to information presented in the most dull manner and
banal experiments which will push a child further from the subject
instead of making him/her love it? What kind of a calculative and
analytical mind can a mathematics texbook develop when it says nothing
is explained about how the x axis and y axis and trigonometric formulae
are used in real life and has instead unrealistic examples like finding
the volume of spheres, cylinders and other odd shapes or buying fifty
watermelons? What kind of national pride is a student going to develop
when the curriculum has history textbooks written by communists which
have pages and pages about Mughals and British Governor Generals but
hardly a paragraph about Rana Pratap or Chhatrapati Shivaji? The way
languages like Sanskrit are taught by making students mug up grammatical
intricacies instead of giving them ample examles from the scriptures
makes them hate it and ridicule it. Ditto with English, with classical
language given the preference instead of the practical, modern one.
Colleges
continue this sorry story, by being a factory to manufacture the
unemployed. The college curriculum is severly outdated like its school
counterpart and cannot put an ounce of employability into the students.
So when they graduate, the students realize that what they have learnt
is not worth two naya paisas in the professional world. What made them
the apple of their teachers' eyes in schools or the most popular guy or
girl in the colleges wont make them even a day labourer in the real
world. They realize that they have been like Neo in the Matrix who on
waking out of their stasis, have no Morpheus to guide them. They realize
that they had been living a bubble wrapped make believe life where
everything is perfect, everything taken care of by their parents and a
bubble wrapped environment beyond which they had the least interest. But
bubbles burst more easily and sooner than anyone thinks. You see
hundreds and hundreds of these hip youngsters everywhere who are
emptily cruising around various malls or racing their bikes who have
nothing but emptiness to stare into. Except the very top institutes,
most of B school, engg and technical graduates can hardly meet the
criteria of their employers. We are conveniently ignoring what horrors
lie in store for us. We pride ourselves so much on being an IT
proficient country conveniently forgetting that there is absolutely no
new development or research of any IT related matter here. All that is
done is repetitive work like coding. IT companies have only
their marketing and back offices here, not R&D. Sabir Bhatia made
Hotmail ,Vinod Dham Pentium chip and Vinod Khosla co founded Sun
Microsystems, but they could never have done it had they been living in
an environment like this.
The
question is are we encouraging free thought? Encouraging children to
form their opinions through self observations instead of turning their
brains into a DVD-R by burning pre conceived archaic dogma into them?
Are we teaching children to think instead of what to think? Are we
teaching them that there is lot more to life instead of evaluating their
entire being on the basis of a marklist? Are we asking ourselves what
good is the present education system if its products are happy to
continue the same morally corrupt practices which make us an ill nation
instead of wanting to end them?
Is
it too much of a demand to ask for a curriculum which has something to
do with real life instead of theory, which makes the students
employable, short vocational courses instead of meaningless lengthy
theories and an environment which makes the students want to go to
school instead of wanting to run away from there? Is it too much to ask
for an educational system which instills moral values and national
character in its students instead of superficiality? Is it too much to
ask for a healthy environment in schools that aids both physical and
mental development instead of causing physical and mental degeneration?
No
wonder then, that India has hardly made any new discoveries or
inventions since its independence. Because great minds can never be
produced in a rigid society where any new thought is frowned upon or
discouraged. All that such a society can produce are mules with blinkers
around their eyes who are sterile mentally.Great minds and a model
society cannot be created in a place where memorization is valued more
than imagination and replication valued more than innovation.As long as
we teach our children what to think instead of how to think, we will be
nothing more than the world's sweatshop where trained monkeys pride
themselves for reinventing the wheel over and over again.
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