Indian Education System, remarkably one of the systems in the world out there churning out tens and thousands of students as engineers, doctors etc.., I can’t speak for the doctors and their education systems, but to be an engineer, One goes through a grilling of 2 or more years to make it to the IITs, NITs and other premier institutes of the country. What’s the worst part is that more than 50% of the students who really enter these universities to pursue their sciences / engineering degrees aren’t really interested in what they’re doing. Oh Oh ! So why here doing something they don’t like and carrying on with it for the rest of their lives ?

Let me tell you all a personal experience, I’ve been mentoring students aged 13-17 during this Google Code In, with FOSSASIA. It’s been an amazing journey so far with these students, seeing their creativity and the desire to learn more all by themselves. Personally I was struck with the effort put in by one of the students from Pakistan, Hannan Ali. I had given the task of building a node.js (web framework) application with a simple sign in functionality and then to list the users who have registered on the web application. I was expecting to see just this, when he came up with something that totally blew my mind. He built an application with the same features as asked in the task but put it all in terms of “The Peace Pledge”, This is an application where people willing to promote peace, register and sign up, They are then shown other users who have registered from across the globe for the peace pledge. Though a very simple task, he had put it in a perspective where he believed this application could solve the problem of wars and promote peace. Students also want to solve problems and they are amazingly creative, lets not kill that creativity with rote learning.

The culprit, “Mera beta/beti Engineer/Doctor banega/banegi”, is something that the movie “3 Idiots” has shown but that’s slowly reducing in most places and the parents aren’t really to blame, so why is there the same issue continuing ? Looking at data from the past 5+ years it’s easy to reference that most of the toppers of these exams choose circuit branches (Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Computer Engineering, Electrical and Electronics Engineering) as their major study areas. Over time, these smartest people of the country as decided by the single (now two) lose their interest in pursuing the course and start taking things very lightly, studying only for the sake of it, passing being a criteria, so where’s the engineering going ?

Though this is trend driven, being a major IT exporter of the world, these are the degrees which are most in demand in the country and even attract other engineering graduates into these fields. Undergraduate students entering these universities are those creative young minds and slowly lose themselves in doing things that they do not love. Pursue your dreams, that’s what everyone has to teach. Everyone has their role to play in the success of an industry or the country at large, so why churn out millions of students into disciplines that they do not like ?

Digging into the root cause, the main problem I believe lies right at the school education level, that’s where the change could be made. Teaching the students to experiment with different disciplines, explore themselves and guide them to decide for themselves are the most important parameters which could make the education system better. But of course the argument remains that no matter what, the exams would be the parameters to grade students, how does scoring high/low at one point of time (i.e. exams) define what’s really the students interest ? A person scoring lesser in mathematics needn’t be told to take biology as a major stream in grade 11 & 12 prior to university and limit themselves to non-engineering and non-science backgrounds. The fault that the student has scored less could lie anywhere, with the teachers who are unable to make learning fun, with the parents who do not spend enough time with their child and understand the problem, with the student itself as to why he’s unable to focus on that subject and score higher.

Rote learning, excessive focus on grading and rating students using exams, peer pressure (family and friends) during school has started making the students to lose their creativity, the desire to explore the unknown and has brought into them the fear of failure resulting in later stages into excessive stress during university to match up to the expectations. There have been many cases of suicide due to this pressure, who is to blame for this ?

What’s really special about school children is that they are really keen to learn, experiment and try things out. With a little guidance, their thoughts could have been the next game changer for the world at large. Avoiding the sports and games periods in school and overriding them with classes to make up for the missing classes during holidays isn’t the way for this to work out. As we grow up, we lose that creativity of making tigers fly and get down to the ground reality that tigers can’t fly, but why limit this creativity from a very very young age. Let students explore, let them experiment, let them fail, that’ll get rid of the fear of failure and gear them up for the real not so nice world out there helping them to stand on their own feet and take responsible decisions.

Okay, enough with the ranting, This could go on and on, what can we do to fix this ?

I believe, the right counselling in schools about the different opportunities out there, the career paths that students could take up to pursue their passions and most importantly, helping the students understand their passion and making them understand how they could build their career in that, helping them pursue their dreams and mentoring them as they craft their dreams out, that’s what schools need to do, that’s what is their responsiblity, that’s what the education system should support.

Added to that, allowing students to take up extra subjects/sports there may be out there and giving them credit for finishing and pursuing them should relieve a large amount of stress from their lives. Childhood is meant to be for fun, to do things that you’d never be able to do as an adult, the happy memories. Instead they are being filled with stress, expectations and learning which isn’t fun, thats definitely not how I want to see young children.

At the university level, there are subjects that aren’t offered but if the student wants to learn more from a subject that’s not their major i.e. wants to take a course in psychology / astronomy / management and has taken a step furthut to finish an offered course from EdX / Coursera / Udacity ? Why not recognize them ? What the education system has done is kill that to learn and experiment. Offer that flexibility, let students study what they really want to study, if it interests them and they’ve pursued it, why not recognize it and award credit for it just as every other course offered at university ? That’d be a major boost, this is the phase where the student is slowly breaking out and understanding what he/she really likes and not giving credit to that kills that interest again and makes them lose their motivation to study.

There needs to be a better system for marking and grading students, my opinion why grade them at all ? If grades matter to industry, I think it’s high time industries take a step furthur and stop looking at CGPA pointers and look at the quality of work that they’d bring in with them into the industry. We definitely need more problem solvers but more than that we need people to do what they do best and love what they do, That itself would solve half the problems because each one is passionate to solve them.