The present statements of Mr. Kapil Sibal, the union HRD minister regarding the present education system prevalent in India aroused a sense of happiness in me and also pushed me into the immediate past, a few months back into my memory lane…
It was a sunny Friday in Norcoss, Atlanta, I was chatting with my friends who were online from India. All of a sudden I realized that I need to visit Bank of America (BOA) for transfer of my funds back to India. So I started out my walk to BOA, it was past noon; as earlier I had been there, I knew it would be a long walk of over two miles. The thought of it marked my walk with brisk and swiftness, after walking for a distance I saw a school, The Norcoss High School. It had a nice looking building with good open space around it and a huge parking lot. The school sported a deserted look, may be the class sessions were going on. Thinking not much about it I went on to reach the BOA, unfortunately my work didn’t happen. Started my strenuous walk back to the room, while I reached the school again this time it was the parking lot first. I saw two high school girls walking towards their car they got into it and drove away, their mannerisms made me to compare them with the rich kids in the top notch schools of India. Though my swiftness had reduced, I continued walking while I was observing and comparing the same with back home at India.
Then I saw another girl in her jogging costume running around the school, few other students playing basket ball. Looking at the school kids playing and enjoying the most precious life, I forgot about my unfortunate times for a second. A few more strides got me at the crossroads of the school and as the school traffic was more I pressed the walk button; was waiting for the walk signal to be flashed. The cars where zooming past me and most of the drivers where barely into their teens, few among the huge looking cars honed loud music with the school kids in it enjoying to the most. When I turned my face to the other side of the road I saw plenty, again huge looking trucks lined up; well no a second look at it made me realize that they are school buses, looking like a hybrid between truck and bus. The liveliness of that atmosphere and the way the school children’s are being treated and nurtured, that wonderful moment buried my other worries.
But soon when I started to compare the situations back home with this, the happiness soon faded leaving me depressed. Yes, we find the similar situations here in India too but in very few high society schools where only the rich and power of the society can set their foot into. The Norcoss high school is any other school in US to my comprehension. It’s time that we realize that we have failed to provide if not the same environment at least a similar situations for children in India. Here I stress upon situations and not the infrastructure, we might lack the infrastructure due to lack of funds, but still we can provide a lively environment to the students where in they can live the life and not run for it.
Over the years we have followed marks or result centric system, where only grades are valued skipping the other valuable assets of a student. There might be lot of reasons for this; I try to figure out few of them:
Ease of Management:
We have not been able to try out more rational methods of evaluation, or even if we did we dared not to change our conventional methods of testing a student i.e, through marks. By flashing the marks/grades on one’s score card, make things easier in differentiating between the students. Here, we have to note that this system makes things easy but it’s not a full proof righteous system. It’s our failure in inventing more appropriate means of evaluation or it’s our failure in implementing better ways. We need to remember that we have failed in this and we the failures are gauging a student’s performance with draconian medieval systems in place.
This, marks system also helps the business to churn out millions sorry billions from the innocent parents in the name of education. Creating a slab system and fixing up the fees based on these slab’s in turn based on the marks. Unfortunately if a student has not been able to secure a rank or marks there lies a business opportunity for these chain institutions.
Conventional Outlook towards performance:
In India right from our childhood we are taught to compete with the rest and competition always is seen only by the means of marks sheet. Due to this over pressure the child will start losing out his basic talent in other fields and concentrate more on gaining marks, as if he is some marks printing machine. We nurture the children based on job/market situations. Once we had a great IT boom going on, everyone was forced to take up this field even without knowing the basic nuances of it. And the result is we produce a huge number of IT professionals who know nothing other than following the directions from the boss and put in the lines of code based on his boss thinking.
The real programmers are a rare commodity who visualize, who think, who solve, who execute and who create the meaningful applications out of his own ideas. We are proud of number of IT professionals that we have been producing over the decades, but why do we still not able to make a google, an ebay, an amazon, a yahoo, a skype many to it but none from India? Why? We have huge and huge base of software personnel but almost every one doesn’t really put his thinking cap and create; most of them work for the service sector dancing to the tunes of the foreign client and desi manager. Lately we are seeing a good number of start up’s trying out new ideas and taking risks, but our IT giants the great Indian IT companies each with tremendous employee strength and huge capital reserves doesn’t really encourage new ideas or new creativity. They are very much happy generating business through maintenance and support activities and caring little about their employees and innovation.
Our culture teaches us to obey the elders and not to say or act against them. And we keep carrying this all our lives, in classrooms we say nothing when we don’t understand, we say nothing when we don’t agree, we say nothing when we have better theories, yes we say nothing in front of elders let alone opposing it. The same thing is carried forward to the work areas; we are the most loyal employees an employer can have in this world. For us Boss is always right and we take pride in doing, YES BOSS! Here the bosses too forget that this kind of employee though might be perfect for the momentous work but in long run, they are doing more harm than good to the organization.
Talking about our conventional outlook towards the life, we think that only the highly educated with high marks are successful in life; I want to add an example here. If Bill Gate’s were to be in India, I guess he would have remained a school dropout without creating the huge Microsoft Empire. I might be wrong too, but the amount of pressure that we put on the children and our over care to secure their future in a highly paying job makes us to pressurize them. And if a brilliant student like Bill Gates drops out from ‘A’ grade school in India, his family would be the first one to start pestering him and his ideas then it would be the society eventually the challenge that he poses in his work will look miniscule when compared to these outwardly pressures.
Huge Population:
The present reforms suggested by Mr. Kapil Sibal have created uproar in certain sections of education community. They are more concerned about the glitches in implementing the reforms going by the fact of our huge population. According to them it’s not easy in execution. Excuse me but who has asked you to trade in an easy path? You are not being paid to follow an easy route in your comfort zone!
Education a mere Business:
I have no second thoughts in saying that Education in India is nothing but a business opportunity for many. Both education and health sector enjoy the status of being humane and very few think of compromising in these. This is where the real exploitation has begun in our country, realizing the importance of these fields in our life’s the businesses in these fields, running operations on the names of chain and corporate are squeezing the money from the innocents.
Right from the schooling to engineering to management no profession is untouchable to these businesses. If I have to talk about schools, the corporate and international schools are way out of reach of a common man. Here the school managements apply all kinds of business tactics which can be taught in B-Schools as case studies. To cite something the schools restrict the parents to buy the books from only one vendor and will not accept if then get it from elsewhere, in turn that vendor pays commission to the school management.
Talking about books make me remember the most important thing which I cannot ignore. The students are made to carry books for all periods on that day and each day will have a minimum of 6 periods. And each period will again have a text, a classwork, a homework and non-detail if it’s a language. On any day the student is made to carry not less than 20 books!! During my schooling I tried to reduce this count by different permutations and combinations only to end up irking the teacher. Whenever I see a student carrying a huge bag on their back, I feel miserable. What a sorry state they are into! Is it not our failure in finding better ways of mentoring?
Next is the most unfortunate period of Indian student or should I be saying a south Indian student? The Intermediate!! Thinking of which scares the hell out of me… Everywhere, you will start hearing about EAMCET, BITS, IIT – if you come into this flavor you must have faced the hardships in school itself, our businessman are even running schools which teach IIT foundation from class 1, huh what a pity!!!
EAMCET a less dreaded term for me has created such a business for the institutes over the years that they can even compete with the likes of Mittal and Mallaya!! The government conducts this exam which tests more of a student’s memory power or their speed of calculation putting aside the main important aspects that’s need to be tested for a future engineer like his analytical power, his reasoning power, his innovativeness; though we find these sections in almost all of the competitive exams less the EAMCET but there they still test the speed and accuracy more. The reason why they have this test is that the board which conducts the basic intermediate believes that its exam system has got flaws. Instead of correcting that exam they came up with another test, the great EAMCET which has marked its own ill efficiencies.
Every year before the exam a debates start up whether to conduct EAMCET or not, but as long as the corporate institutes are making money by luring the students into the EAMCET trap this exam is going to continue with full support from the govt. The news channels makes business with those debates, the person flashing on the screen with the debates makes name and creates his brand, the institutes makes money from coaching, the govt. / The politician’s makes money from the institutes, the lecturers makes money by troubling the students; everyone associated with it directly or indirectly makes money. But the poor student ends up screwing his valuable 2 yrs of student life restricting himself to the books and ends up getting a seat in an engineering college which he would have got anyways without EAMCET as well and with much less pain. His pain is their gain!!
Now it’s time to study in an engineering college, after wasting two years over some bulky books and also wasting the parent’s hard earned money. The business doesn’t end there; they accompany you in every field that you get into. Once I happen to pass through the Ameerpet lane in Hyderabad, I was so amused with the sight of it the whole lane leaving no gap in all the commercial complexes are filled up with coaching institutes posters. I could see my entire syllabus book (computer science) on the walls of the buildings and also the banners tied over the road. If I had collected all the pamphlets that were being thrown at me, I am sure I could have given my note book a miss for few days. Everywhere I could only see the computer languages, packages, platforms and what not; man they teach a lot!!
Enough of technology let’s move on to Management education. CAT, XAT, SAT, MAT, ATMA, ICET, PGCET – these are the few tests that I remember as of now but the list is a lot more. Every state, every institute, every university comes up with their own exam. And the basic background that they test for remains the same in every exam. Then why do they have all these? When they can follow one centralized test? Why? Answer again is simple; hit the people where they cannot return your blow. Each exam generates huge revenues to the parent institute or the body which conducts it. Most of the institutes seek the applications even before the results are out, so that the student in confusion ends up applying to every institute at the end he ends up joining only one or not even that.
We are at slight disadvantage when compared to the English speaking nations:
If you have imagined that I want to highlight the point that as we are not English speakers we are at disadvantage globally then you are wrong. Infact we are much better speakers of English than the others as our accent and diction is much clearer than theirs. It is very unfortunate to see few of our Indians faking their accents to sound like a foreign national, mostly seen in US. The point I want to highlight here is that from schooling we have to learn more than two languages like if our native language is Telugu, we will have to learn Telugu, again learn the Indian official language Hindi (it is not our national language as most of us think, Hindi is our official language and not national) then we have to learn the universal English language. Whole of our schooling we spend half of our time on these languages, leaving with only half of the time for the other important sciences. Over and upon this in intermediate we are made to take Sanskrit or French as we get higher marks in them. Sanskrit is no doubt a beautiful language and we will love to learn it but the purpose being solved is miniscule.
My Suggestions for better Education system in place:
We should stop glorifying the tried and tested paths. Stop glorifying the IIT’s, IIM’s and other premier institutes, they are also like any other institute with some better facilities and better process. But they cannot make you onto something which you are not, if you don’t have the real talent and a strong intent to achieve even an IIT or IIM cannot help you out. Believe me once you are done with your education and out into the real world, the students of great institutes and not so great institutes all end in similar companies may be with different pay packages. And from there it’s the performance that’s matters and not the institute background. Even a student from just an ordinary college will have a complete chance to prove his mettle and prove that he can do better than an IITian or IIM graduate. There is a need to also increase the present institutes or upgrade the prevalent ones into better institutes, till then the institutes will not stop their exploitation in the name of management quota. It is startling to know that people are more than willing to shell out 40, 50 lacs even up to a crore for a medical seat!!!
We also should stop glorifying few of the professions over the others. No profession is better over the other. It only matters how good you are in that profession and how you perform and you can only perform when you are really interested in it. To take an example from past few years we have glorified the IT profession a lot over the others, only to realize that it is the most vulnerable and now the sheen that it had of high pay packages and fast growth is quickly fading. What about the scores and scores of IT professionals now? They are left at the crossroads with closed routes!! When you stop glorifying certain fields the child will not be influenced by your thoughts and will choose his own path out of his own interest.
The advantages it will have:
Coming to the exam pattern and the system, my mantra is straight and simple; TEST THEM NOT!!!
When, the situation becomes imperative to conduct the test, so as to allot few available seats. Even then the gradual evaluations that was done can be utilized, when it is felt it doesn’t help then there should be only one exam throughout India which is rational and proper with thorough research put into before conducting the exam. This way we will be reducing the trauma that a student goes through to attempt each and every exam that keeps evolving every day.
Talking about our examination based system; none of us can have a doubt over the supremacy of civil services in India over the other exams. The IAS, IPS and others are believed to be the brilliant sections of the society as they have cleared the toughest exams. But the recent survey by an independent agency has placed our bureaucrats at 8th position among the other asian countries and point here is they have taken in the data from only 8 nations and placed India at the last. If our believed to be best persons are rated the last in asia itself it’s a guess for any, where they will be standing over the globe. If the land of billion is not been able to produce the best, then certainly the fault lies with the selection system and for such top posts of India the system should have a process in place to gauge the candidates sincerity and honesty towards the nation along with other process to test the intelligence etc.
Stop testing a student based merely on an exam on a day. Start observing and analyzing as he evolves, as he studies, as he behaves, as he performs throughout the year of study. This system will give a comprehensive understanding about a student in not just the studies but also about his all round personality.
And this system should not be again based on marks/grades. It has to be a conclusive study which identifies his strengths and weaknesses, which identifies his talents and passions. Bases on this study the child needs to be encouraged in whatever he is interested in or whatever he does the best. This way the child grows up with immense satisfaction, grows up in confidence and lives his life to the fullest and not run for it. This will also helps him in making a sound decision about his future career and he will never be in confusion while taking up his path, unlike us the present generation!!
This way a nation of billion will also have diverse profiles, diverse professionals, diverse interests and millions to represent the country in various fields and domains. The day this happens INDIA will be second to none. But for this to happen we need an honest, truthful govt. which will work towards it; with sincere interest. This can change the people’s outlook towards the performance and success. I earnestly hope that I see this happening. The govt. needs to work on this with sincere efforts and think about the reforms in education but I guess they would do so only when the children get a right to vote!!!
Lastly only thing I want to say is
THEY ARE YOUR FUTURE,
TEST THEM NOT!!!
It was a sunny Friday in Norcoss, Atlanta, I was chatting with my friends who were online from India. All of a sudden I realized that I need to visit Bank of America (BOA) for transfer of my funds back to India. So I started out my walk to BOA, it was past noon; as earlier I had been there, I knew it would be a long walk of over two miles. The thought of it marked my walk with brisk and swiftness, after walking for a distance I saw a school, The Norcoss High School. It had a nice looking building with good open space around it and a huge parking lot. The school sported a deserted look, may be the class sessions were going on. Thinking not much about it I went on to reach the BOA, unfortunately my work didn’t happen. Started my strenuous walk back to the room, while I reached the school again this time it was the parking lot first. I saw two high school girls walking towards their car they got into it and drove away, their mannerisms made me to compare them with the rich kids in the top notch schools of India. Though my swiftness had reduced, I continued walking while I was observing and comparing the same with back home at India.
Then I saw another girl in her jogging costume running around the school, few other students playing basket ball. Looking at the school kids playing and enjoying the most precious life, I forgot about my unfortunate times for a second. A few more strides got me at the crossroads of the school and as the school traffic was more I pressed the walk button; was waiting for the walk signal to be flashed. The cars where zooming past me and most of the drivers where barely into their teens, few among the huge looking cars honed loud music with the school kids in it enjoying to the most. When I turned my face to the other side of the road I saw plenty, again huge looking trucks lined up; well no a second look at it made me realize that they are school buses, looking like a hybrid between truck and bus. The liveliness of that atmosphere and the way the school children’s are being treated and nurtured, that wonderful moment buried my other worries.
But soon when I started to compare the situations back home with this, the happiness soon faded leaving me depressed. Yes, we find the similar situations here in India too but in very few high society schools where only the rich and power of the society can set their foot into. The Norcoss high school is any other school in US to my comprehension. It’s time that we realize that we have failed to provide if not the same environment at least a similar situations for children in India. Here I stress upon situations and not the infrastructure, we might lack the infrastructure due to lack of funds, but still we can provide a lively environment to the students where in they can live the life and not run for it.
Over the years we have followed marks or result centric system, where only grades are valued skipping the other valuable assets of a student. There might be lot of reasons for this; I try to figure out few of them:
Ease of Management:
We have not been able to try out more rational methods of evaluation, or even if we did we dared not to change our conventional methods of testing a student i.e, through marks. By flashing the marks/grades on one’s score card, make things easier in differentiating between the students. Here, we have to note that this system makes things easy but it’s not a full proof righteous system. It’s our failure in inventing more appropriate means of evaluation or it’s our failure in implementing better ways. We need to remember that we have failed in this and we the failures are gauging a student’s performance with draconian medieval systems in place.
This, marks system also helps the business to churn out millions sorry billions from the innocent parents in the name of education. Creating a slab system and fixing up the fees based on these slab’s in turn based on the marks. Unfortunately if a student has not been able to secure a rank or marks there lies a business opportunity for these chain institutions.
Conventional Outlook towards performance:
In India right from our childhood we are taught to compete with the rest and competition always is seen only by the means of marks sheet. Due to this over pressure the child will start losing out his basic talent in other fields and concentrate more on gaining marks, as if he is some marks printing machine. We nurture the children based on job/market situations. Once we had a great IT boom going on, everyone was forced to take up this field even without knowing the basic nuances of it. And the result is we produce a huge number of IT professionals who know nothing other than following the directions from the boss and put in the lines of code based on his boss thinking.
The real programmers are a rare commodity who visualize, who think, who solve, who execute and who create the meaningful applications out of his own ideas. We are proud of number of IT professionals that we have been producing over the decades, but why do we still not able to make a google, an ebay, an amazon, a yahoo, a skype many to it but none from India? Why? We have huge and huge base of software personnel but almost every one doesn’t really put his thinking cap and create; most of them work for the service sector dancing to the tunes of the foreign client and desi manager. Lately we are seeing a good number of start up’s trying out new ideas and taking risks, but our IT giants the great Indian IT companies each with tremendous employee strength and huge capital reserves doesn’t really encourage new ideas or new creativity. They are very much happy generating business through maintenance and support activities and caring little about their employees and innovation.
Our culture teaches us to obey the elders and not to say or act against them. And we keep carrying this all our lives, in classrooms we say nothing when we don’t understand, we say nothing when we don’t agree, we say nothing when we have better theories, yes we say nothing in front of elders let alone opposing it. The same thing is carried forward to the work areas; we are the most loyal employees an employer can have in this world. For us Boss is always right and we take pride in doing, YES BOSS! Here the bosses too forget that this kind of employee though might be perfect for the momentous work but in long run, they are doing more harm than good to the organization.
Talking about our conventional outlook towards the life, we think that only the highly educated with high marks are successful in life; I want to add an example here. If Bill Gate’s were to be in India, I guess he would have remained a school dropout without creating the huge Microsoft Empire. I might be wrong too, but the amount of pressure that we put on the children and our over care to secure their future in a highly paying job makes us to pressurize them. And if a brilliant student like Bill Gates drops out from ‘A’ grade school in India, his family would be the first one to start pestering him and his ideas then it would be the society eventually the challenge that he poses in his work will look miniscule when compared to these outwardly pressures.
Huge Population:
The present reforms suggested by Mr. Kapil Sibal have created uproar in certain sections of education community. They are more concerned about the glitches in implementing the reforms going by the fact of our huge population. According to them it’s not easy in execution. Excuse me but who has asked you to trade in an easy path? You are not being paid to follow an easy route in your comfort zone!
Education a mere Business:
I have no second thoughts in saying that Education in India is nothing but a business opportunity for many. Both education and health sector enjoy the status of being humane and very few think of compromising in these. This is where the real exploitation has begun in our country, realizing the importance of these fields in our life’s the businesses in these fields, running operations on the names of chain and corporate are squeezing the money from the innocents.
Right from the schooling to engineering to management no profession is untouchable to these businesses. If I have to talk about schools, the corporate and international schools are way out of reach of a common man. Here the school managements apply all kinds of business tactics which can be taught in B-Schools as case studies. To cite something the schools restrict the parents to buy the books from only one vendor and will not accept if then get it from elsewhere, in turn that vendor pays commission to the school management.
Talking about books make me remember the most important thing which I cannot ignore. The students are made to carry books for all periods on that day and each day will have a minimum of 6 periods. And each period will again have a text, a classwork, a homework and non-detail if it’s a language. On any day the student is made to carry not less than 20 books!! During my schooling I tried to reduce this count by different permutations and combinations only to end up irking the teacher. Whenever I see a student carrying a huge bag on their back, I feel miserable. What a sorry state they are into! Is it not our failure in finding better ways of mentoring?
Next is the most unfortunate period of Indian student or should I be saying a south Indian student? The Intermediate!! Thinking of which scares the hell out of me… Everywhere, you will start hearing about EAMCET, BITS, IIT – if you come into this flavor you must have faced the hardships in school itself, our businessman are even running schools which teach IIT foundation from class 1, huh what a pity!!!
EAMCET a less dreaded term for me has created such a business for the institutes over the years that they can even compete with the likes of Mittal and Mallaya!! The government conducts this exam which tests more of a student’s memory power or their speed of calculation putting aside the main important aspects that’s need to be tested for a future engineer like his analytical power, his reasoning power, his innovativeness; though we find these sections in almost all of the competitive exams less the EAMCET but there they still test the speed and accuracy more. The reason why they have this test is that the board which conducts the basic intermediate believes that its exam system has got flaws. Instead of correcting that exam they came up with another test, the great EAMCET which has marked its own ill efficiencies.
Every year before the exam a debates start up whether to conduct EAMCET or not, but as long as the corporate institutes are making money by luring the students into the EAMCET trap this exam is going to continue with full support from the govt. The news channels makes business with those debates, the person flashing on the screen with the debates makes name and creates his brand, the institutes makes money from coaching, the govt. / The politician’s makes money from the institutes, the lecturers makes money by troubling the students; everyone associated with it directly or indirectly makes money. But the poor student ends up screwing his valuable 2 yrs of student life restricting himself to the books and ends up getting a seat in an engineering college which he would have got anyways without EAMCET as well and with much less pain. His pain is their gain!!
Now it’s time to study in an engineering college, after wasting two years over some bulky books and also wasting the parent’s hard earned money. The business doesn’t end there; they accompany you in every field that you get into. Once I happen to pass through the Ameerpet lane in Hyderabad, I was so amused with the sight of it the whole lane leaving no gap in all the commercial complexes are filled up with coaching institutes posters. I could see my entire syllabus book (computer science) on the walls of the buildings and also the banners tied over the road. If I had collected all the pamphlets that were being thrown at me, I am sure I could have given my note book a miss for few days. Everywhere I could only see the computer languages, packages, platforms and what not; man they teach a lot!!
Enough of technology let’s move on to Management education. CAT, XAT, SAT, MAT, ATMA, ICET, PGCET – these are the few tests that I remember as of now but the list is a lot more. Every state, every institute, every university comes up with their own exam. And the basic background that they test for remains the same in every exam. Then why do they have all these? When they can follow one centralized test? Why? Answer again is simple; hit the people where they cannot return your blow. Each exam generates huge revenues to the parent institute or the body which conducts it. Most of the institutes seek the applications even before the results are out, so that the student in confusion ends up applying to every institute at the end he ends up joining only one or not even that.
We are at slight disadvantage when compared to the English speaking nations:
If you have imagined that I want to highlight the point that as we are not English speakers we are at disadvantage globally then you are wrong. Infact we are much better speakers of English than the others as our accent and diction is much clearer than theirs. It is very unfortunate to see few of our Indians faking their accents to sound like a foreign national, mostly seen in US. The point I want to highlight here is that from schooling we have to learn more than two languages like if our native language is Telugu, we will have to learn Telugu, again learn the Indian official language Hindi (it is not our national language as most of us think, Hindi is our official language and not national) then we have to learn the universal English language. Whole of our schooling we spend half of our time on these languages, leaving with only half of the time for the other important sciences. Over and upon this in intermediate we are made to take Sanskrit or French as we get higher marks in them. Sanskrit is no doubt a beautiful language and we will love to learn it but the purpose being solved is miniscule.
My Suggestions for better Education system in place:
We should stop glorifying the tried and tested paths. Stop glorifying the IIT’s, IIM’s and other premier institutes, they are also like any other institute with some better facilities and better process. But they cannot make you onto something which you are not, if you don’t have the real talent and a strong intent to achieve even an IIT or IIM cannot help you out. Believe me once you are done with your education and out into the real world, the students of great institutes and not so great institutes all end in similar companies may be with different pay packages. And from there it’s the performance that’s matters and not the institute background. Even a student from just an ordinary college will have a complete chance to prove his mettle and prove that he can do better than an IITian or IIM graduate. There is a need to also increase the present institutes or upgrade the prevalent ones into better institutes, till then the institutes will not stop their exploitation in the name of management quota. It is startling to know that people are more than willing to shell out 40, 50 lacs even up to a crore for a medical seat!!!
We also should stop glorifying few of the professions over the others. No profession is better over the other. It only matters how good you are in that profession and how you perform and you can only perform when you are really interested in it. To take an example from past few years we have glorified the IT profession a lot over the others, only to realize that it is the most vulnerable and now the sheen that it had of high pay packages and fast growth is quickly fading. What about the scores and scores of IT professionals now? They are left at the crossroads with closed routes!! When you stop glorifying certain fields the child will not be influenced by your thoughts and will choose his own path out of his own interest.
The advantages it will have:
- It will be less stressful as the child will not be under pressure to enter a path against his interest.
- He will enjoy both while learning, while implementing his ideas and also while working.
- India will have experts and the best people in every field and not just engineering, IT, medicine.
- As the people will choose various paths, the competition for certain sectors will reduce like for engineering or management making the present exams a misfit.
- The businesses will be left with no other option than withdrawing from the Educational field.
When, the situation becomes imperative to conduct the test, so as to allot few available seats. Even then the gradual evaluations that was done can be utilized, when it is felt it doesn’t help then there should be only one exam throughout India which is rational and proper with thorough research put into before conducting the exam. This way we will be reducing the trauma that a student goes through to attempt each and every exam that keeps evolving every day.
Talking about our examination based system; none of us can have a doubt over the supremacy of civil services in India over the other exams. The IAS, IPS and others are believed to be the brilliant sections of the society as they have cleared the toughest exams. But the recent survey by an independent agency has placed our bureaucrats at 8th position among the other asian countries and point here is they have taken in the data from only 8 nations and placed India at the last. If our believed to be best persons are rated the last in asia itself it’s a guess for any, where they will be standing over the globe. If the land of billion is not been able to produce the best, then certainly the fault lies with the selection system and for such top posts of India the system should have a process in place to gauge the candidates sincerity and honesty towards the nation along with other process to test the intelligence etc.
Stop testing a student based merely on an exam on a day. Start observing and analyzing as he evolves, as he studies, as he behaves, as he performs throughout the year of study. This system will give a comprehensive understanding about a student in not just the studies but also about his all round personality.
And this system should not be again based on marks/grades. It has to be a conclusive study which identifies his strengths and weaknesses, which identifies his talents and passions. Bases on this study the child needs to be encouraged in whatever he is interested in or whatever he does the best. This way the child grows up with immense satisfaction, grows up in confidence and lives his life to the fullest and not run for it. This will also helps him in making a sound decision about his future career and he will never be in confusion while taking up his path, unlike us the present generation!!
This way a nation of billion will also have diverse profiles, diverse professionals, diverse interests and millions to represent the country in various fields and domains. The day this happens INDIA will be second to none. But for this to happen we need an honest, truthful govt. which will work towards it; with sincere interest. This can change the people’s outlook towards the performance and success. I earnestly hope that I see this happening. The govt. needs to work on this with sincere efforts and think about the reforms in education but I guess they would do so only when the children get a right to vote!!!
Lastly only thing I want to say is
THEY ARE YOUR FUTURE,
TEST THEM NOT!!!
