Indian Education System - A call for reform

It's definitely a topic that needs to be addressed. Education has been a problem in our country and lack of it has been blamed for all sorts of evil for hundreds of years. Education system in India is failing because of more intrinsic reasons. There are systemic faults that do not let our demand for good education translate into a great marketplace with excellent education services. India has historically been a country of great scholars like Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Rajendra Prasad, Dr. Zakir Hussain and many more. What made them achieve their goal wasn't because of our education system but their ability to think independently and think freely. They were made to think rationally, imply their logic and reasoning to what they studied.

Fast forward to 21st century and you get an education system where ranks, grades and percentage are of prime importance, and learning and skills take a back seat. Education is seen as a duty than a necessity. We also live in a country where the people see education as the means of climbing the social and economic ladder.  Nowadays education is fully based on book knowledge only. The current Education system does not give opportunity for the students to think individually based on their knowledge and create innovative things on their own. The system just allow us to mugging informations for only the sake of getting good marks. So there is no opportunity to show the students knowledge to the outside world. In this country, millions of students are victim of an unrealistic, pointless, mindless rat race. The mind numbing competition and rote learning do not only crush the creativity and originality of millions of Indian students every year, it also drives brilliant students to commit suicide.

Need to realize that not everyone is a born Einstein or a Newton. Different individuals have different talents and different learning abilities. But the system places so much stress on book learning that all other talents get overshadowed by a person’s ability to memorize facts and then to reproduce them in the examination. Albert Einstein once said that everyone Is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. We need to come up with a system that will help everyone at the same time.We believe in "one size fits all" logic which is not true at all.There is a need to personalise education. Some students are quick learners while others are comparatively slow learners. Some are visual learners; some are auditory learners, while others learn from their experience. You can't just

apply same yardstick to teach and evaluate each of them and hence a need to personalize education to cater to each and every student's process and demand of learning. Establishing more schools and colleges is not going to help. An overhaul is seriously needed to the education system.

Education is vital to the progression of our society, but the education system we use now has a lot of major flaws.First of all, it uses a very cynical way of judging our students;labeling students with letters as a reward for cramming their heads with facts, or as a punishment for doing it less effectively, is a horrible way of motivating students and making them learn, and this has been proven over and over in multiple studies. Education is important, but we should encourage learning, not judge our students based on how fast they do it.

 Schools these days only require that students learn how to answer a standardized test correctly and move on from there but the downside to this is that students don't retain knowledge of what they've learned. All schools are these days are just giant machines to pump out "educated" kids to a standardized line and nothing greater. Research has proven that there are different types of learners such a

visual, audible and so on. Curriculum these days only support students in maybe one or two of the ways of learning and while some might excel, other students will begin to fall and its a spiral for both sides where

one gets better and the other worsens.

One biggest drawback of our education system is the reservation system. No person should be given a priority based on his/her caste, gender, race, etc. The admissions to any institution should be based on pure merit. Even the most prestigious institutions of our country are

a partner to this system. For example the cut-off for the scheduled students is kept much lower in nation-wide examinations like JEE or KVPY. The women applicants and non-engineers are given around 5% extra marks in CAT examination. This is the reason that many brilliant students of our country end up into foreign nations leading to lack of young and budding scientists,capitalists, accountants, entrepreneurs, engineers and doctors in our country.what should change in India education system? What needs to be fixed at the earliest? Here is my wish list:

1.Focus on skill based education

Our education system is geared towards teaching and testing knowledge at every level as opposed to teaching skills.“Give a man a fish and you feed him one day, teach him how to catch fishes and you feed him for a lifetime.” I believe that if you teach a man a skill, you enable him for a lifetime. Knowledge is largely forgotten after the semester exam is over. Still, year after year Indian students focus on cramming

information. The best crammers are rewarded by the system. This is one of the fundamental flaws of our education system. Free thinking, creativity and innovating ideas should be encouraged. They should be molded on the foundation of these skills, creative thinking and innovative ideas that will serve them in the longer run.

2.Reward creativity, original thinking, research and innovation

Our education system rarely rewards what deserves highest academic accolades. Deviance is discouraged. Risk taking is mocked. Our testing and marking systems need to be built to recognize original contributions, in form of creativity, problem solving, valuable original research and innovation. If we could do this successfully Indian education system would have changed overnight.

3.Get smarter people to teach

It is high time to encourage a breed of superstar teachers. The internet has created this possibility – the performance of a teacher now need not be restricted to a small classroom. Now the performance of a teacher can be opened up for the world to see. The better teacher will be more popular, and acquire more students. That’s the way of the future.We need leaders, entrepreneurs in teaching positions, not salaried people trying to hold on to their mantle.Permission to run an educational institutions should be granted to such persons who actually belong to the field of education (In today's era most of the educational institutions are owned by Land Lord's, politicians,business man etc. ).

4.Implement massive technology

Infrastructure for education India needs to embrace internet and technology if it has to teach all of its huge population, the majority of

which is located in remote villages. Now that we have computers and internet,it makes sense to invest in technological infrastructure that will make access to knowledge easier than ever. Instead of focusing on outdated models of brick and mortar colleges and universities, we need to create educational delivery mechanisms that can actually take the wealth of human knowledge to the masses.Students should encouraged to use digital information medium such a Google, Wikipedia , YouTube and other educational sites.Innovative methods should be adopted to increase the interest of the students towards education. The tools for this dissemination will be cheap smartphones, tablets and computers with high speed internet connection. While all these are becoming more possible than ever before, there is lot of innovation yet to take place in this space.

5.Re-define the purpose of the education system

Our education system is still a colonial education system geared towards generating babus and pen-pushers under the newly acquired skin of modernity. We may have the most number of engineering graduates in the world, but that certainly has not translated into much technological innovation here. Rather, we are busy running the call centres of the rest of the world – that is where our engineering skills end.The goal of our new education system should be to create entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, scientists, thinkers and writers who can

establish the foundation of a knowledge based economy rather than the low-quality service provider nation that we are turning into.

6.Personalize education – one size does not fit all

If something is good for one kid, it is not good for all kids.Some kids learn faster, some are comparatively slow. Some people are visual learners, others are auditory learners, and still some others learn faster from experience. If however, we can effectively decentralize education,and if the government did not obsessively control what would be the “syllabus”and what will be the method of instruction, there could be an explosion of new and innovative courses geared towards serving various niches of learners,Take for example, the market for learning dancing. There are very different dance forms that attract students with different tastes. More importantly, different teachers and institutes have developed different ways of teaching dancing. This could never happen if there was a central board of dancing education which enforced strict standards of what will be taught and how such things are to be taught. Central regulation kills choice, and stifles innovation too. As far as education is concerned, availability of choices, de-regulation,profitability, entrepreneurship and emergence of niche courses are all inter-connected.

7.Make reservation irrelevant

One biggest drawback of our education system is the reservation system. No person should be given a priority based on his/her caste, gender, race, etc. The admissions to any institution should be based on pure merit. If we want to emerge as a country build on a knowledge economy, driven by highly educated people – we need to make good education so universally available that reservation will lose its meaning.There is no reservation in online education – because it scales. Today top universities worldwide are taking various courses online, and today you can easily attend a live class taught by a top professor of Harvard University online if you want, no matter which country is belong to. This is the future,this is the easy way to beat reservation and make it inconsequential.

As India mourns the death of one of its greatest visionaries, Dr. Abdul Kalam,there is a need to emphasize his view about the Indian Education System: “In decades time, India will need 300 to 500 million employable skilled youth and there's a need to completely change the university education syllabus and secondary school education syllabus”.

Finally I concluded that, the good Education system also helps to develop our nation all over the world so it must be reformed to practical knowledge and to provide updated knowledge or information.