A lot of words\u00a0have been exchanged\u00a0in the media recently\u00a0regarding\u00a0the quality of\u00a0the students passing out of\u00a0IITs\u00a0which\u00a0are deemed\u00a0to be\u00a0the premier engineering institutions in our country. At least 5 lakh engineers graduate every year in India and the number contributed by\u00a0IITs\u00a0to that is negligible. What makes it even more irrelevant is\u00a0the fact that\u00a0a lot of\u00a0IITians\u00a0go abroad for further education and career prospects. The problem is representative of the absurd education culture that has gained a strong hold in India.<\/p>\n
Teachers do not always need to teach,\u00a0evaluate\u00a0or discipline their students. Most of the times, just providing the inspiration and nudging them in the right direction will do. If we try to find out why our teachers are unable to do that, it does\u00a0reveal\u00a0a lot of interesting things.<\/p>\n
Engineering and Medicine are head and shoulders above the rest of educational streams in terms of capturing\u00a0the imagination of\u00a0the students and their parents. Every Tom, Dick and Harry wants his child to become an Engineer or a doctor. The fact that most IT companies hire engineers and pay them obscene amounts of money to\u00a0do the quantity\u00a0of work that would pay much less in other fields, has fueled this imbalance. As a result, most of the brilliant young minds are lost to the engineering stream and disproportionately lot of them become the\u00a0clich\u00e9d\u00a0‘Indian Software Engineer’. In most of the developed countries, only such brilliant young minds pursue higher studies and research and enter the teaching field. But in India, few of the people who missed the engineering and medicine bus pursue the teaching profession for their livelihood. Is it fair to expect such people\u00a0to be\u00a0experts in their subject and at the same time have the skills needed to impart the knowledge and inspire the students? This starts an endless chain of mediocrity feeding on mediocrity that only a few students who\u00a0are gifted\u00a0or passionate enough to work hard and break-free of the limitations of the system, stand out and succeed.<\/p>\n
Students\u00a0are taught\u00a0and encouraged to reproduce the text on the books, even though most books condemn verbatim unauthorized reproduction of the text with criminal implications. \ud83d\ude09 We should encourage people to learn and apply whatever they have learnt. Why should there be a system to rate and grade students if every student is good at different things? To change this anomaly, the thinking of people should change. Someone has to break the vicious cycle. Any stream of education and employment is as good as any other. The monetary benefits\u00a0may be\u00a0disparate, but so are the domains. Once the general opinion changes, there will be changes in the salaries too.<\/p>\n
As too much undue importance\u00a0is placed\u00a0on engineering and medicine,\u00a0IITs, NITs and\u00a0IIMs, too many people want to get in and as a result some sort of mechanism\u00a0is needed\u00a0to pick the bright minds to get in. The industry of coaching centers\u00a0has been built\u00a0on this. The competition becomes even more cut-throat with reservation creeping in. My belief on reservation is that if there are downtrodden people, measures\u00a0must be\u00a0taken to uplift them by providing excellent education that will enable children from such families to reach high ambitions. Instead, politicians are hell-bent on providing reservation to such people to gain political mileage. In reality, reservation\u00a0is enjoyed by the\u00a0wrong people and the downtrodden do not get any benefit out of it and\u00a0remain\u00a0downtrodden for further political exploitation.<\/p>\n
Once the measures to uplift the downtrodden at the\u00a0grass-root\u00a0level of education is in place, we should do away with reservation elsewhere and let merit prevail. As more people get good education, the undue craze on particular streams will vanish and there will definitely be a sense of equality. I have seen students panic when questions in the exam paper are of the same format of those in the books but with the variable names changed. Doesn’t that defeat\u00a0the\u00a0purpose of education?<\/p>\n
Computer Science is essentially a mathematical science, but how many computer science students are well-versed with the mathematical background that\u00a0is required? A lot of such students become lecturers who in turn teach the students whatever is present in the prescribed books without ever touching upon the required background knowledge. As a result most of the\u00a0modern-day\u00a0engineering students hardly know mathematics that computer science\u00a0is built\u00a0upon. Whatever they have learned solely for the purpose getting a job starts and ends with the periphery of the\u00a0subject. Worsening things is\u00a0the fact that\u00a0the students choose to skip a lot of the subject as the exam system allows them to do so. They don’t realize that skipping things doesn’t help learning at all. If we learn things, however small and trivial, properly and fully, the benefits of that will automatically follow. But most students are either not interested in putting the required effort to learn or too lazy and are solely focused on the benefits. This is how we have easily arrived at such a pathetic state. I am not carrying a holier than thou attitude here as even I am a product of the very same flawed system that I want\u00a0to be\u00a0overhauled. The fact that a lot of students survive the system and still make it big in their lives shouldn’t be\u00a0an excuse to persist with the same system. Already there is very little research and innovation happening in India and we are so happy and content to ape and idolize whatever happens in the developed countries and stay unmoved. If this continues, we may lose forever a lot of great young minds who could make a huge difference to our country and\u00a0humanity.<\/p>\n
I do not claim that my thoughts and ideas are foolproof and will withstand the test of time, but I rest my case that the current education system\u00a0is flawed\u00a0and it requires a big overhaul along with the general thought pattern of people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A lot of words\u00a0have been exchanged\u00a0in the media recently\u00a0regarding\u00a0the quality of\u00a0the students passing out of\u00a0IITs\u00a0which\u00a0are deemed\u00a0to be\u00a0the premier engineering institutions in our country. At least 5 lakh engineers graduate every year in India and the number contributed by\u00a0IITs\u00a0to that is negligible. What makes it even more irrelevant is\u00a0the fact that\u00a0a lot of\u00a0IITians\u00a0go abroad for further […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,19],"tags":[53,64,68,110,117,184],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academics","category-career","category-knowledge","tag-career-prospects","tag-education-system","tag-engineering","tag-knowledge-2","tag-learning","tag-teachers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lguruprasad.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lguruprasad.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lguruprasad.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lguruprasad.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lguruprasad.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lguruprasad.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lguruprasad.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lguruprasad.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lguruprasad.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}