08/10/2015
India’s education system seems to be reflecting the symptoms of perversion of education standards. What looks extremely awkward and worsens the situation is that we’re not doing anything about it but play the paralyzed onlooker. Even though many educational reforms are introduced by the government to upgrade the level of higher education, nothing worthwhile has come out till date.
Unlike how the traditional approach of the country always did it, we’re now following the mass production rule wherein 25% of our total population is still illiterate; only 15% reach high school, and just 7% graduate. The quality of education, whether at primary or higher education level, is significantly poor as compared to major developing nations. As show the stats till 2008, total seats our UG level institutions had could accommodate about 7% of college-age population only. The worse, around 25% of teachers’ posts were vacant and 57% of college professors lacked either a master's or PhD degree. After this stage, however, we have registered slight improvement on that scenario.
Most of our institutes, educational organizations remain short of faculty and facilities. They don’t normally meet the norms set by our regulatory authorities, which, obviously, affects the quality of education. Then education system In India is not fully based on merit. It relies more on caste-based reservation policy. 50% reservations are always there in our colleges and universities. Andhra Pradesh, with minimum 83.33% reservations as on 2012, is the biggest Indian state in terms of reservation quota.
Let’s analyze how fair or unfair is what schools are doing today. Does the teaching technique we follow instill moral traits essential for elegant and happy living inside young minds? Or they just train us how to participate in unhealthy competition for power and money! Nothing would be as bad and unfortunate as all of us (young people, especially!) joining this blind race leading almost nowhere.
One of the miscellaneous factors responsible for degradation of education standards in India is carelessness while appointing teachers and giving them the responsibility of teaching. This mainly is a problem with private institutes. Very often we see them hire freshly passed out engineers etc. to teach starting batches. What logics after all we can put to justify such decisions and how. Though there is nothing bad in giving freshers a chance to launch them, still quality can’t be compromised - no, not at all. Qualification, experience and expertise matter for a teacher, actually.
Today, in such a situation, we need to have and maintain an education system which is a perfect balance of knowledge, skills, ethics, values and even more importantly, common sense. A system which relies more on quality and proves to be capable of realizing the dream of culture-opulent education our ancestors saw years back.
Why we need to emphasize the need of experienced teachers to upgrade education, higher education especially, is because it’s somewhere about generations to come. They’ll have to educate their successors and they would pass on to them, of course, what we give them now. Now it can be easily understood why it is utterly essential for them to keep in reserve the essence of higher education, that too qualitative, bequeathed to them by the right people, at the right time.
To conclude, this is “it is money and power that decides happiness and success in life” type of thinking that can ruin the thing here in that case. We often see young people dropping higher education to earn and then lead ordinary life throughout life. Though it is money we take education, run and work for, still it is not the only motive. All such decisions we take are pure selfishness. A country can grow with the growth of education only and it is essential to maintain the level of higher education for this to happen.
It is even more important to mention that our educational think-tank seems to be going completely illogical while promoting the need of more and more education centres, private or government. Opening too much colleges and schools won’t help in raising the standard of education, but we ought to first generate quality, reward creativity, and beget originality in thoughts to encourage innovation.