Is The Conventional Educational System Rotting Careers ?

An educational meet by Ex Prime Minister back in 2013 discussing Higher Education scene in India made it quite clear Indian educational culture is puzzling. The foreign delegates in the education sector raised the same age-old problem with Indian education system: “Why does the Indian education system remain at a standstill, while business is moving and the skills-gap is widening?”

Also, a grave concern about the status of the education system in the country is full of ambiguity and falling out of the employability context giving away expensive paper degrees and outdated teaching methods which are only good for turning intelligent people into zombies.

The rot goes deeper, because of structural reasons. The first is that the current system of education — allegedly ‘modern’ — is inherently perverse: It was imposed upon India by the British imperialists, with the single-minded purpose of creating coolies and clerks to help them run the country without make them qualified in the right direction. With the quality of education in the colleges, there is simply no room for creativity or high-quality research.

 With the outbreak of technological change, the Indian education system has been still largely following traditional approaches whereas the modern Indian demands a dramatic change in the way education is perceived in India. Comments and concerns by Germans investors last year at a meet should make us realize that we are sitting on a skills time bomb that will explode if we do not take up job-related vocational training. 

 Day by day it is becoming very difficult to find graduates with the right skill set for business within the changing technological framework.

 Indian government’s attempt at introducing vocational training and allocating huge budgets focusing at this has been made. The question remains are the colleges imparting vocational training for higher employability opportunities?

We need to bridge the gap between education and work as simple as that. We need to ensure that the education goes beyond the classroom. Education should be about empowering people to gain employable skills and this can be done through vocational courses. The courses that have  its focal point around training that delivers value in terms of good jobs and making students more capable to be taken in by big companies.

The colleges in the modern times should not mould students without a dissertation, blackballed and unemployable. A focus on skill training as against university degrees would help. Undoubtedly the literacy level has increased but there’s no real human value addition which is why the Indian Education system demands a reform.

The methodology of the colleges today is repetitive, unproductive and builds a breed of ill equipped people who can’t be good enough to be employed beyond their degrees. We need to revive our education system completely and move from the culture of degrees to learning.

It’s time to follow this directive “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. The key element here should be that education system must foster “out of the box thinking” which is hugely lacking in our country. We focus on creating a league of mindless followers. In India, the best crammers for tests are rewarded. The ever left need is to learn skills, and more importantly learn how to apply them. Creativity, original thinking, research, and innovation must all be cultivated and encouraged from a young age. This is the primary reason why Indian students escape India and prefer learning abroad. If India was able to replicate the educational system abroad and was able to either prevent its students from leaving, or was able to attract students from other countries, $17 billion would be saved annually.

The universities here have been long following the rules of the imperialists. Our universities continue tunneling students into constricted streams, taught by few quality institutions, sought by many anxious thousands.

Suffocating education suffocates growth, lazy teaching and rote-based themes cutting off the birth of new ideas, new possibilities.

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.