Education System of India

India produces more engineers than the total population of Switzerland. Still, Switzerland is number one in research and innovation.

After independence, the Republic of India has produced zero noble laureates in science but within the same time period, the USA has produced noble laureates who are 100 plus in number.

The new Annual Employability Survey 2019 report by Aspiring Minds reveals that 80% of Indian engineers are not fit for any job in the knowledge economy and only 2.5% of them possess tech skills in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that industry requires.

Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella and many other popular people have done their education outside India.

To find the root cause and problems hidden in our education system, we have to go back to the time when India was ruled by Britishers. In that time East India Company had two major challenges to rule India. First was the need for communication with Indians in their British English language and second, was the need for workers in India who will work without any question and creativity.

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English is not the most spoken language in the world but now English has become more of a class than a language in India. The people of Russia, France, China and many other countries are not obsessed with English as compared to Indians. In India, your communication will be marked as poor if you're not good in English.

Five-year-old mobiles and computers are becoming outdated but we are still continuing and following British ruled education system without any major update. In our most important education system, we still attend the competition of grasping everything only by recalling or rereading things instead of understanding and applying. Now, whoever can grasp and vomit, scores more. 

Hence the person with 95 per cent marks in Sanskrit is not able to speak Sanskrit. There are large volumes of useless history books that are taught to us whereas we don’t need to grasp and remember things, whatever we need we can get it from google. In Government schools, every class has an English subject and we continue to spend time studying English for up to 12 years. After that also we can not speak English but without reading any book a 5-year-old child can speak English because he gets a proper environment. 

(a+b)^2=a^2+b^2+2 ab

Everyone knows the above equation but many of us, even many principals and teachers don’t know the real-life application and they don’t apply it in their real life. But if you speak by mistake 3ab instead of 2ab then you will find many to laugh at you. Kindergarten technique of teaching students is a thousand times better than the teaching methods used in college. Many students who score higher marks in exams still find cheating as the best method when the teacher is absent or present in the classroom. These students also struggle in real life.

Everyone is taught with the same syllabus and same techniques instead of any single attempt of identification in their capability. We are not concerned with the development of creativity and innovation from any angle. If you will make a queue of lions, elephants, fish, snakes and other animals and you will tell them to climb a tree then many of them will surely feel that they will be incapable to succeed for their whole life.  In the ancient system, Dronacharya also taught Pandavas depending on their skill-sets and helped them to grow in their favourite areas. Many options are not there in our current education system, only science, commerce and arts are the popular ones. As compared to science students, no one gives importance to art students. With all these competitions and comparisons every parent dreams to see their children as a doctor or engineer. It’s a mentality to disrespect all other courses run by all other institutions. From the very childhood, parents, relatives and everyone in society will train that if you can't score good marks and a job then your life is a waste. Then because of society, the child runs behind the marks and grades keeping aside all his own dreams and forgetting all his capability to create and innovate. Now when that child gets more marks, he develops more pride and ego and creates a jealousy environment among other participants in that race. If the child doesn’t get his expected marks, he gets depressed by himself even in the case when there is no one to make him feel down or low from society.

If you will find successful people like Dhirubhai Ambani, Virat Kohli, Amir Khan or Narendra Modi then, of course, they are not because of this education system. They are not in the trap of the current education system. They learned and educated themselves to grow in their life.

If you tell a CEO to conduct an interview in all the departments, then he may find more than half of employees are under-fit as per their qualification and education but that CEO can run the whole company with his own skills. But we don’t discuss the skills of that CEO in our education system.

People spend more than one-fourth of their life in this current education system so that they can work for companies of under-qualified persons as compared to them instead of making their own business or industry. 

If our education system is really fine then why the politicians and celebrities are sending their kids to foreign countries. We must make it compulsory for politicians and celebrities to educate their kids within their own localities. At least there may be the chance of better education in those localities.

For 368 peon jobs, 1,50,000 graduates and 24,968 postgraduates applied. IAS is all about passion but many people have the mentality to enter in any government job. For government jobs, people do spend more than 5 years of preparation and the only reason is that they feel the job is secure than any other jobs. Also, the reason is that no one is going to make them out of their job even if they don’t do their work in a right and proper way.  Many people who work for private companies have the fear of losing their jobs which is only because of lack of confidence in their abilities created through their education system.

If we will talk about the coming 5 years, we don’t know if our skills will be relevant or not as per the changes in technologies. Cloud computing, SEO, digital marketing were not existing in the past. We have to open up ourselves to learn new things and technologies with a creative mind.

The real education is based on focus and concentration on self whereas modern education teaches a lot about the external world which is filled with all types of competition and comparison. It does not teach us how to go to the core of our being where true peace and happiness can be found. As a result, there is much unrest in humans nowadays. Ashtanga yoga was there in the ancient wisdom which guides us towards divine peace, happiness and love. Instead of speed and efficiency, we need quality and value in our system.

Footnotes:

1. The Facebook link which I copied and felt reality is the same

2. Quora link: Why do most people try to become an 'advice guru'?
   

3. Quora link: Is 68% a bad mark?