It has been a long time from the day our country got independence. A lot of things has changed. A lot of things has been modified and still changing with the pace. Below is a contrastic change between a phone before and now.
How about a contrast between vehicles from the past and now.
But hey, One thing has not changed, our education system. It was same back then and it is the same till date. I cannot see much change except the picture quality.
Don’t you think, something is horribly wrong with our education system. We are still following the same trend of teaching that we used to follow in the past, given the fact that everything has changed. Do you still think that mental mathematics is important because you won’t have a calculator with you every time?
Table of Contents
Schools as Product Assembly Line
Our education system stinks and it stinks really bad. There is a lot of similarities between the schools today and the product assembly. You make students sit in a straight row as you keep parts of products on a conveyor belt. You make every student compete with each other in order to test their resilience and reliability. Just as you make a product undergo various different quality tests. If it fails, the product is rejected and retesting is performed. If a student successfully clears every test than an OK stamp is put on their mark sheet and pushed forward to the outer world.
Do I want to ask one really simple question – What is that one thing that will help you to shape this world? I really don’t think that our current education system is capable of teaching them anything that will help them to understand how this world actually functions. And this is the biggest reason why students are failing. They do not have right to choose their own stream. In fact, there are not many streams left for them. From the very beginning of their lives, they have been told that you have to study well, you have to beat others, you must come first in class. Their minds have been fed with competition instead of collaboration. They work to defeat others instead of making everyone win. Is this our basic nature? I still remember my childhood days and remind myself of those days when I was free. That was real freedom. Only if I knew back then that this freedom will be taken away from me in the name of education then I would have resisted.
You see these systems are very well designed to lure a kid inside but there is a major flaw in the system. This system judge each and every kid with the same repetitive technique, just like an assembly line product. Albert Einstein once said – Everybody is a genius, but If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, then it will live its whole life believing that it was stupid. This is exactly what is happening in today’s day to day life.All students are being trained in the same scale irrespective of their other talents. They are being fed the same old books that our grandparents used to study. Each and every student is measured in the same scale and with the same old techniques. They don’t even consider that different people need different ways and have different requirements. Small children are committing suicide because of the pressure caused by their parents and schools. This pressure is not because they have to invent something new or they are expected to come up with some great product that would change the world rather the pressure is because of the competition that they have to come first in class, district, state or India because then only they can earn enough to fulfill all their needs.
Story time…
Let me tell you a short story about the history of Engineering. Engineering is there in our culture from quite a long but it had a totally different meaning from the one that we use today. The engineer was someone who used to operate military engines (constructor of military engines). But, today the word engineer means “Innate quality, especially mental power”. Therefore, engineers are believed to be more clever and therefore will invent more useful things for the society to work with. In India, engineers came with the trend of foreign education when Britishers came to India and provided higher education and jobs to the Indians. People saw security and thus started educating their kids in the hope for a better job. Who doesn’t want a safe and secure future ?and thus started an era of engineers.
Lack of career awareness
In India there are only 3 career paths for any student from a middle-class family and that is to become a doctor or an engineer and nowadays a new trend has emerged and that is CA. People of India are driven by money rather than passion and that is the reason why they go after anything that will pay them more without understanding the fact that they can earn much more if they will follow their true passion. This type of mindset is pretty new as compared to the history of India. And this mindset has come with the emergence of foreign education in India. The education system of India is not there to part education rather they are there to train students and to make them ready to get a job. Students are being fed that they have to study hard so that they will get a nice job. This has become very clear in the movie “3 Idiots”. Students are going after excellence rather money and competition. They are not trying to work in unison for a better world rather trying to get above someone or getting someone below them. I’m not just saying these words to myself, I have observed this type of mentality in children of our society.
Schools must be some place where people can really learn about themselves, their strengths and their true passions. They should come out of school enlightened, clear about their future goals and what they are meant to do. But, it is actually opposite from it. Students coming out of schools are unclear about their objectives and then they choose the SAFER side (Engineering :p). I have so many friends who were forced to join engineering college even when their interest was in something else entirely. I have a friend who is excellent in fashion designing but instead, she is doing engineering because of the sheer pressure from their parents. Their parents think that there is less scope in the field of fashion designing. The problem is not the parents but the schools who did not widen the scope of their parents. If schools would have given a platform to her instead of teaching her A for apple, B for Ball then I’m sure that the situation would have been entirely different.
Here is a ‘faadu’ rap by boyinaband on present day schooling. He says Don’t stay in school. Watch the video below?
Teachers needs to take initiatives
Teachers play one of the biggest roles in carving students future. They are the ones who gives students an outlook towards life. We all are aware of the importance of a teacher in students life but it is surprising to see that teaching comes in one of the lowest paying occupations in India. In India teaching is looked upon as a person who has not done anything good with his life, therefore, he/she has opted for teaching. I have met many people who are teaching just because they do not have anything else to do and this is kind of a serious issue. I’m not pointing it to the profession of teachers but the value it pays to the person in our society.
Teaching is such a big responsibility of shaping the future of our countries and I know that teachers must be paid more and given the stature like engineers in our country. Teaching profession must be motivated in our country and more and more people should make it as their first profession and not the fallback profession.
Boundaries in profession
Teachers those who are passionate towards their profession are not given enough control over the teaching pattern so that they can contribute their part in the making. They are bounded by the rules made by the higher authorities who have no idea how a student must be taught. They have not taught even a day in school and are responsible for making the syllabus and deciding the way in which a student must be taught. What kind of hell place is this where the person who doesn’t even know about a thing is given the entire command. Don’t you think it’s time to change?
Parents are just for school fees and meeting
In most of the schools, parents are merely responsible for the school fees. They are not involved in any activity that takes place in school. They are called twice in a year in the name of the parent-teacher meeting. Most of the time parents are not even aware of their child’s syllabus and what is being taught in the school. On top of that, they expect their kid to score the highest percentage in the school.
The biggest reason for this problem are not the parents but the school itself. They do not provide any way for parents to get the information about their students whenever they want. It’s just a lack of social connection. To overcome this problem, Many schools have started inter-social connection network which helps them to connect each student with the teacher and every parent with their kids. That way they have created a healthy atmosphere inside as well as outside the school. Also, information about the child is easily accessible by their parents at any point in time. It can really make it easy for parents to get the complete picture of their kids overall development and can decide for themselves what is needed to be done.
The real problem
In my opinion, the problem is the old education system and also the management system of school which are following the same old recipe to teach and measure every student on the same scale. Most of the schools don’t allow mobile phones inside which is a major drawback because they are not making use of technology instead prohibiting it.
Possible solution
The solution is very simple, just bring one change at a time. Just imagine the possibilities, if they will start carrying the smartphones inside the campus. Management will become so much easier.
There will be no need for attendance every day because this would be done automatically by the smartphones. This will save 15 minutes every day which can be replaced by something fruitful (maybe, like a morning meditation session).
If a discussion platform is provided then they would be able to actively share their views on the panel which will help them to research on their own and come up with the ideas and answers. This type of learning will be based on helping others and collaboration with other irrespective of the one which involves defeating others and competing with others.
Use it to make a student’s platform, let them create data and contribute to the web. Just imagine the possibility that it can unlock by simply motivating students to use social platform for their goods. Like using youtube to upload their videos that would make them more aware and related. It will directly help the school to manage and improve the quality of education to each and every student because now it will be students who will research and generate data based on their own knowledge and understanding. School will only be responsible for giving them a direction which is the best for them (keeping in mind each and every student individually).
Just by bringing this simple change you are inviting tremendous amount of opportunities which will lead this generation into a better world. People will start to collaborate instead of competing with each other. They will talk about new ways instead of ratta-fication. They will start to question everything and that will be our victory. We just need to find a way to keep their curiosity alive and in today’s world with easy access to information, this is pretty easy.
Just think about it for a moment and let me know your views on the same.
And As always,
Be my aficionado 🙂