Indian Education Crisis

One of India's foundation pillar has been knowledge. We had great learned sages who contributed a lot to the world of Science and Philosophy. India also had one of the most ancient Universities. Some of the research that happened in these universites changed the whole world. In our mythology too we had given high importance to science and knowledge, Saraswati, Bramha, Vishwakarma etc. are peculiar examples of our interest in knowledge.

But, even after our interest and inclination towards a knowledge based society why have we failed to create an example in the modern world. India today is nowhere when it comes to education standard. We failed terribly in keeping up the reputation of our ancestors. We are not even able to provide proper basic education where most of the other nations are achieving high level of advanced education. There are only a few Universities in India which could compete truly with the global Universities and for a country with hundreds of Universities this is clearly an underperformance. We must be having a very serious problem that we are lacking so much in our education standard.

Even after having so many boards and committees for educational reforms and regulation, We don't see a significant change in the results. We need to unshackle the whole education system and make it liberal, make it future oriented rather than just plain information oriented. Our education system has become obsolete and somehow our private schools has got the idea that duplicating the culture of aboard schools will help. What we see today is the loss of trust in Government schools that they can provide good quality of education and this trust has been transfered on to private institutions.

One of the biggest change that private schools has brought is the increase in the involvement of parents in the process of child's education which is good to a extent but the excessive pressure of performance is leading to a major exploitation of this model. Parents are now a days seen doing their kid's projects, a project which would have been a great learning experience for a kid has become pride of a parent. This is all because of competition and performance pressure. Everybody wants to secure good marks and make it to the few good institutions in the country so that they have a better future than someone who might have secured just 1 mark less. The recent cutoffs released by Delhi board is threatening to a student's state of mind. After seeing such cutoffs all hope of a good future might crumble for a student preparing for such exams.

Our advanced education system is like hundred years old. The syllabus is so old that special training has to be provided to our graduates so that they could work in the real world. Our engineers still learn the same thing that is taught in high schools in developed countries. I bet that a kid from US can beat any computer science graduate from India. There are some exceptional institutes like IITs but they are very few in numbers considering India's population. What we need to do is to raise the standard of all the educational institutes and universities to make them competent enough. Another problem is that engineering, medical and commerce are considered to be the only professional courses, rest all are for low graders. If we count number of unemployed engineers in India, it might be greater the population of few countries. The reason behind this is lack of awareness and fear of doing something different.

Education has become a measure of one's personality rather than the tool of evolution. We are sowing the wrong seed by making education, exam and grades oriented from the very first day of school and similar is expected from students till the last day of college. Education was never meant to discriminate between people but to bring them closer and understand each other and their needs. Grades are dictating the future of kids, completely ignoring their interests and talents. We have come to a stage where the board exam should be pushed back to 5th or 6th standard as the age of mental maturity has also reduced in these modern time. This will allow children to make choices early in their life and will be able to follow interests without wasting any time.

India is now in the startup age, but a strong and research based education system could provide our entrepreneurs immense help by supporting the ideas with knowledge. The basic problem that we have faced till now is the rigidity of the system. We have not been able to keep up with the pace with which the world has evolved in terms of knowledge and its delivery. What we need today is complete transformation of education sector through some innovative ideas, not only at the grass root level but the whole system should be given a new standard. Brain drain will also be handled if we would be able improve the education standards and might even attract students from developed countries like it use to happen in ancient times.