Academics - Let's change it

The purpose of teaching is not the memorizing of some dates & facts, that the student is not interested in knowing the exact date of a battle or the birthday of some marshal or other - Adolf Hitler

When did the battle of Plassey started? Who won the battle of Panipat? In what period Sindh Monarchy existed? These were the questions which toppled my mark-sheets in all standards. At that time I used to think what these Integral and Differentials equations of mathematics have to do with our lives, and I am still wondering. Those boring chemistry reactions and equations which we crammed day and night, but still got doomed by their fable.

While reading Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ I took a pause at the above statement by him, and was forced to think that our educational system is still the same as the Austrians or Germans had at that time. I don’t know whether their academics has changed or not, but I can definitely say that Indian education system is still the same or we can say, it deteriorated a lot instead of improvements. Recently I was reading some reputation rankings announced by some international education authority and not even a single Indian institute figured in the top hundred.

Indian Universities have proved to be irrelevant or not good enough for the rest of the world. We may be churning out the largest number of engineers in the world, or have millions of graduates each year. But until our universities perform better and create a reputation for themselves, the degrees do not carry much value. An Indian degree is still seen with suspicion across the world. And they are right too, as there are hundreds of such Universities which are selling degrees like cakes; and these so called distant education centers made the situation worst.

In India what are pupils expected to do? Read? Write? Memorize? Think? Socialize? In my view academics have a range of deliverables, prime among them is leadership, Social etiquettes, Character development and well-being. But sad to say, here we don’t teach children even the commonest things – love for the Environment, for the cleanliness, for the fellow students; all we teach is competition. You have to score 90 - 95% doesn’t matter how you achieve it; by putting your health down or your character.

Almost everybody watched and praised ‘Taare Zameen pe’ but nobody followed the lesson it delivered. It’s really common, we like those movies which shows a different side of the stories that don’t exist in India and we want those to exist, but don’t do anything for that to happen. We either do not know the way of value creation or we are unwilling to break down the barriers to working with our ideas and intellect. Be the change, let’s open up, encourage your children to diversify to think on their own, let them generate their own ideas, their own future. There is life outside the Engineering and Doctorate madness; there is life outside the mad rush of percentage.