The Education System

Awesome, detailed and comprehensive analysis. But depressing. I have felt this whenever I participated in any school or even college practices, for example in the CBSE or state boards, or an Engineering college. A system of extreme scores-orientation and filtering, combined with a Potemkin village-like teaching, learning and evaluation. Even the post-graduate students and teachers show zero interest in any work. They are pre-occupied with finishing the portions, administration, event management and social ceremonies.

There is a system design for subtle racketeering everywhere. The syllabus is hopelessly broad, the subjects irrelevant to a future career, the practicals a farce, yet the frequent tests, homework assignments and examinations are strenuous. Without doing private tuitions with either the same teachers who officially teach in the class, or more expensive coaching classes, a student is not even n the good graces of the evaluators.

Added to that are the large-scale evaluation rackets. Scores are arbitrarily changed and even distributed in weird statistical patterns. In the ICSE batch 2013, out of 140807 students, no one had a score of 56-57, or anywhere in the interval 0-30 and 96-100, in English. In history/civics, computer applications, science and Hindi, remarkably similar patterns were observed. What is this special score between 56-57 that no student gets? For all subjects the list of un-attained marks is – 36, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93. Yes, that’s 33 numbers!

Clearly, there is a systematic yet lopsided assigning of scores done at some central level!

Other types of bad ecosystems, money-making opportunites and general bad sanitation are well described by Shri Pankaj Saxena here.

But we need more dissemination of such diagnosis, more such system-level analysis. We also need to remove things from the syllabuses like:

– lettering in Engineering Drawing (in these days of fonts and CAD)
– Handy Andy in High-school English
– whether a subject in on a state list, central list or concurrent list, process for legislating money bills in Class 9 Civics
– whether rivers/mountains are epeirogenic or orogenic, in class 9 Geography.
– and innumerable others

I say this because the language of such texts is unreadable, difficult to retain and only encourages rote learning. Who benefits from such learning in 10-12 different subjects every year? This does not equip a person to increase his aptitude, do well in various competitive exams or interviews or get practical knowledge in a vocation.

What is the way to seed an alternative eco-system?