Indian Education System:
Indian Education
System: What needs to change?
Make education personal again
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
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
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.
Education system in
Let’s explore something else in this one: what should
change in
Focus on skill based education
Our education system is geared towards teaching and
testing knowledge at every level as opposed to teaching skills. “Give a man a
fish and you feed him one day, teach him how to catch fishes and you feed him
for a lifetime.” I believe that if you teach a man a skill, you enable
him for a lifetime. Knowledge is largely forgotten after the semester exam is
over. Still, year after year Indian students focus on cramming information.
The best crammers are rewarded by the system. This is one of the fundamental
flaws of our education system.
Reward creativity, original
thinking, research and innovation
Our education system rarely rewards what deserves
highest academic accolades. Deviance is discouraged. Risk taking is mocked.
Our testing and marking systems need to be built to recognize original
contributions, in form of creativity, problem solving, valuable original
research and innovation. If we could do this successfully Indian education
system would have changed overnight.
Memorising is no learning; the biggest flaw in our
education system is perhaps that it incentivizes memorizing above
originality.
Get smarter people to teach
For way too long teaching became the sanctuary of the
incompetent. Teaching jobs are until today widely regarded as safe,
well-paying, risk-free and low-pressure jobs. Once a teacher told me in high
school “Well, if you guys don’t study it is entirely your loss – I will get
my salary at the end of the month anyway.” He could not put across the lack
of incentive for being good at teaching any better. Thousands of terrible
teachers all over
Education for all
It is high time to encourage a breed of superstar
teachers. The internet has created this possibility – the performance of a
teacher now need not be restricted to a small classroom. Now the performance
of a teacher can be opened up for the world to see. The better teacher will
be more popular, and acquire more students. That’s the way of the future. Read here about why I think that we are closing on to
the age of rockstar teachers.
We need leaders, entrepreneurs in teaching positions,
not salaried people trying to hold on to their mantle.
Implement massive technology
infrastructure for education
Re-define the purpose of the
education system
Our education system is still a colonial education
system geared towards generating babus and pen-pushers under the newly
acquired skin of modernity. We may have the most number of engineering
graduates in the world, but that certainly has not translated into much
technological innovation here. Rather, we are busy running the call centres
of the rest of the world – that is where our engineering skills end.
The goal of our new education system should be to
create entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, scientists, thinkers and writers
who can establish the foundation of a knowledge based economy rather than the
low-quality service provider nation that we are turning into.
Effective deregulation
Until today, an institute of higher education in
There is an urgent need for effective de-regulation of
Indian education sector so that there is infusion of sufficient capital and
those who provide or create extraordinary educational products or services
are adequately rewarded.
Take mediocrity out of the system
Our education system today encourages mediocrity – in
students, in teachers, throughout the system. It is easy to survive as a
mediocre student, or a mediocre tea
cher in an educational institution. No one shuts down
a mediocre college or mediocre school. Hard work is always tough, the path to
excellence is fraught with difficulties. Mediocrity is comfortable. Our
education system will remain sub-par or mediocre until we make it clear that
it is not ok to be mediocre. If we want excellence, mediocrity cannot be tolerated.
Mediocrity has to be discarded as an option. Life of those who are mediocre
must be made difficult so that excellence
Personalize education – one size
does not fit all
Assembly line education prepares assembly line
workers. However, the drift of economic world is away from assembly line
production. Indian education system is built on the presumption that if
something is good for one kid, it is good for all kids.
Some kids learn faster, some are comparatively slow.
Some people are visual learners, others are auditory learners, and still some
others learn faster from experience. If one massive monolithic education system has
to provide education to everyone, then there is no option but to assume that
one size fits all. If however, we can effectively decentralize education, and
if the government did not obsessively control what would be the “syllabus”
and
what will be the method of instruction, there
could be an explosion of new and innovative courses geared towards serving
various niches of learners,
Take for example, the market for learning dancing.
There are very different dance forms that attract students with different
tastes. More importantly, different teachers and institutes have developed
different ways of teaching dancing. This could never happen if there was a
central board of dancing education which enforced strict standards of what
will be taught and how such things are to be taught.
Central regulation kills choice, and stifles
innovation too. As far as education is concerned, availability of choices,
de-regulation, profitability, entrepreneurship and emergence of niche courses
are all inter-connected.
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.
Make reservation irrelevant
We have reservation in education today because
education is not available universally. Education has to be rationed. This is
not a long –term solution. If we want to emerge as a country build on a
knowledge economy, driven by highly educated people – we need to make good
education so universally available that reservation will lose its meaning.
There is no reservation in online education – because
it scales. Today top universities worldwide are taking various courses
online, and today you can easily attend a live class taught by a top
professor of
What are the most important changes you want to see in
the
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Details of how
the school system works in India, including the type of education available…
The Education
System
Types of Schools
Related
Information
What is the state of education after Independence
in India
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