What has failed our education system in India?
Education system in India carries the colonial baggage shouldered by us for decades now. It is a structure that was built to produce civil servants, clerks and bureaucrats who could do the routine job. Not much has changed in the objective of our education system, even today. Now we have engineers being produced in bulk creating imbalance in the demand and supply in the job market.
The same old rote learning mentality of students to score the highest marks, holds priority not only for the students but their guiding angels (parents and teachers). There is a thin line drawn between an educated and talented individual. Anyone with a first class degree is preferred over a hardworking and talented student, who scores in an average slot.
The impact becomes larger when the marking trend overshadows the interest of a student, making him/her incompetent in the real corporate world. The career graph of an individual is rather drafted on the basis of the report card marks.
What makes the situation even more bizarre is the fact that with more and more students frequently and routinely scoring 90% marks, in their board exams, have raised the cut off bar for the college/university to an impractical score.
This further narrows down the entry door limit, leaving a major of students chunk of in the mediocre bracket. The recent roll back of the four year undergraduate programme (FYUP) introduced in Delhi University, was another example of a confused education paradigm of universities.
More than 70% of the course structure focuses on preparing its students for their best performance in the examination and does not pay heed to the teaching process. In this attempt we often see that some intelligent students, who are not good performers in class written tests, are often left behind and challenged in their career path.
Education which was meant to reform human behavior appears to have failed to achieve its goal, rather it has further confused students in their directed path. The lack of a standard method of learning/ teaching has made ‘a particular course’ different for different individual.
MBA students who have acquired the degrees from different colleges/universities are unknown to the standard idea of the management course. Some universities prefer to stick around the old rhetorical academic syllabus without implementation of new ideas; while some have become totally skill-centric following a western pattern of educational paradigm.
Who are the ultimate sufferers?
In this process it is ultimately the economy that suffers. Lack of skilled employable students leads to ineffective growth in the industry and increasing rate of joblessness in the country. Jobs are then filled in by semi-skilled people who do not contribute to the industry in the required manner.
According to the 2011 census, increasing literacy rate in the country, from 12% (1947) to nearly 74.04 %, has not made a real growth in the literate class. Learning the basic English language and fundamentals of different subject matter is a a half-hearted attempt towards the bigger goal of producing intellectuals who can then contribute in the society and industry.
What should be the road-map ahead?
It is imperative for educational institutes to instill the zeal of learning and practising knowledge in students. A balanced course structure including the theoretical, practical and industrial training is apt for a complete graduation course.
It is important for universities to train its students for the final deliverance so that the corporate houses can save a lot of training cost on their employees. This can further strength the competitive standards of all the universities as well as create a healthy job market.
Manav Rachna International University(MRIU) much acclaimed for producing highly skilled and employable batch of students excelling in their respective field has set out an amended model of education, which allows it students to choose their method of learning as per their skills and capacity.
Students at MRIU are not only provided with the best infrastructural and research resource to keep them updated with the latest technology but they are given an upgraded industrial training from time to time, to enhance their adaptability in the changing industrial environment.
Students from MRIU find it easy to fit into the dynamic and changing work environment as they have been trained on the ground, under the guidance of experts from the academia as well as by the professionals from the real corporate world.
Students today need to re-create their learning paradigm as with advancement in technology and evolution of time, it is difficult to achieve excellence with the old archaic method of education practised in greater part of the country today.
It is true to believe the saying ” I was born intelligent but education ruined me”; in order to change this distorted thought we need to restart our defunct body of education and overhaul it with a progressive and innovative approach.