The very flaws of the education system in India…
It’s been a while since the last blog on Anubhav, and it is time for one. This is my first blog post and the first post for the year 2023 on Anubhav. Let’s make this post on a critical and sensitive topic that builds the country’s future generations… and that’s the fallbacks of the Indian Education system and some suggestions for its betterment.
There is a very old saying for the key to success as below:
Don't run behind success; You could never cope up with it.
Run for excellence; you will leave success far behind yourself.
But the Indian Education system has unintentionally become the exact opposite this saying. The students (or more broadly learners who may also be the employees working to improve themselves or the elderly people trying to learn new emerging things in the world) are willingly or unwillingly just trying to run behind the temporary success, and that’s passing the exams instead of running for excellence which is to grab and understand the concepts, idea or the story behind the subject and hence are getting hurdles in their pathway to final life goal.
Now in most of the cases where students are willing to go into the depths of the topic and hence make a step towards excellence, many teachers now have a habit of just saying the things from the syllabus due to the ‘system’ usually shrug off the students saying that: “If it’s not in the syllabus, just skip it or do it yourself.” And I wouldn’t even blame the teachers for this as this has gradually become the learning trend.
These are just a tiny part of the long list of flaws in the educational system. The major ones are the lack of adequate practical education right from primary schools. For example, the students from class 3 do learn Fractions as it is in the syllabus, but most of them do not even know their practical significance. They think that it is just a concept used to solve some problems confined to theoretical calculations, and they do not matter in real life. I know this may sound like over-exaggeration, but it’s the reality that I’ve seen for my Tuition students.
The other very important thing is that the ‘system’ doesn’t offer a way for identifying the hidden talent or potential of a student and further refining it, instead, it just focuses on the pretty unrealistic and unnecessary subjects. The student having a great potential in sports sometimes doesn’t even know his/her capabilities and he/she is also not so well at studies. So the person feels like he/she is worth nothing which is often an issue with teens which is one of the major reasons behind depression.
The students are often told to complete notes and project works which are pretty unnecessary, as that is some work already done by someone else just copied by the student to his/her book. Instead students can invest the same time for some productive things, learning new practical things or for his/her hobby. This is one of the issues present with mostly all the educational institutes.
All this is only one side of the coin. As I, a student cannot understand the bigger issues with the educators but I’m sure that the passionate teachers would also be facing a lot of issues with the system, which we, as a student couldn’t understand. So, at the end there are a lot of fallbacks of our current Educational system, but thankfully, our current government is trying to change this system majorly so as to provide better learning path and better opportunities for the students via the ‘New Education Policy’, so, lets hope the best with this new policy and let’s pray that this fixes most of the issues with the system both for the educators and the students.
Better late than never.
My suggestion to the system is to adopt from the ancient Indian Gurukul system for the education of the children, as it included a lot more practical and necessary lessons that are very useful in life. And also more importantly, it teaches self-discipline, better way-of-life, live-saving skills, and caters to all round development i.e., both mental and physical development of the student which is the reason for the large number of wise and strong kings in India like Chandragupta Mourya, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and many other unsung warriors and deep thinkers. It was also the reason for India being the origin of some great scientists like Aryabhatta, who invented Zero ‘0’, without which, the modern mathematics would be all broken and hence would other sciences.
Post your own thoughts and suggestions to improve the standard of Indian Education system in the comments below.