Time for change- Dear Indian Education System…
In the current education system, students are like tender, beautiful flowers, while the education, instead of being the radiant, glistening sunshine, is just a cold shower of apathetic, merciless hailstones.
What inspired me to write this is the recent suicide of one of my close friends due to not getting a job, ultimately due to high competition. Having studied through schools and college, I believe I can give a proper account of the flaws within the Indian education system.
Education is the stepping stone to a country’s progress. It plays an essential role in shaping small children and teaching them skills and knowledge essential for leading a proper life later on. Students gain a unique personality and important lessons of life only through education. Proper education helps students blossom into responsible adults and good students. However, an education system that is lacking in many aspects will only serve to make adults with inherent flaws and being short of human beings.
The Indian education system has been in place and has not changed much from the British era. It caters to and serves hundreds of millions of students across the country. While being impressive enough to serve such a large number of students, our education system is still far from the ideal standard Such faults need to be addressed and then resolved.
Indian education heavily relies on rote memorization and cramming. Students often take the easier path and rather than think and concept, they just end up memorizing it. In fact, cramming in the last days of the exam and getting a score in India is even heavily glorified. Too much attention is paid to exams and students are often forced to get better grades, resulting in high stress and depression if a student does not perform well in studies. These factors last into adulthood, a large proportion of the country’s working population is under high stress, and over one-fifth of the population has undiagnosed depression.
There is much less focus on teaching real-life skills in the current education systems. The system is impractical and too disconnected from reality; even the subjects themselves seem to have boundaries within them. Subjects like paying taxes, sex education, family planning, personality development are rarely given any importance. Most of what students learn isn’t used in their lives. Most students learn about practical things themselves or remain uneducated.
Each student is built differently and everyone has their own strengths. Our education scarcely recognizes this and subjects, everyone, to the same treatment. Students need education suited to their needs and demands. Of course, this is certainly difficult in a country such as India with a huge population, but it is feasible. Gifted children need a different system of education that recognizes their abilities and talents. The same goes for disabled students or those with autism.
The continuous rise of online learning and skill development on platforms like Udemy, Skillshare, and even YouTube goes to show how newer educational models can certainly help students. The current pandemic showed that newer methods need to be adopted. This certainly serves as an incentive to modify the current system.
Schools often levy too much pressure on students. With the continuously cascading series of homework assignments, coupled with exam stress. Students are burdened with too much mental strain from a very young age. There is high competition for high-paying jobs in the country and coaching institutes take advantage of these to make profits and overwork students. There is little to no government or educational body’s interference to stop this extreme competition or decrease the stress on students.
Lately, student suicides have been increasing in India. These students often perform badly at academics despite giving their level best and guilt-tripped and shamed by parents and teachers alike. Teachers pay no attention to the improvement of poor students and this leads to a wide gap between them and those who score well; this translates ultimately to a skill gap and later a financial void. Students performing poorly in academics fall into a vicious cycle at the end of which is just utter failure and despair.
One of the major factors highlighting the failure of education is the continuous rise of the Hikikomori phenomenon. Students deeming themselves failures often stop attending classes and stay shut-ins for years on end. The number of undiagnosed cases for mental illnesses like depression and BPD is rising continuously. The same is true for countries with similar education systems that focus on cramming and memorization like Japan.
There is little to no scope for creativity or critical thinking. Students are told just to learn the material. There is no scope for visualizing or understanding the concept. Students are often discouraged from asking doubts or learning more than the syllabus of their respective classes. This results in the products of the education system being just automatons with no real personality or idea of themselves. Education needs to go beyond the scope of books and explore more areas, like art, video games with important lessons like Undertale, Omori or Minecraft, and other interactive media.
While inherently flawed, our education system certainly has a lot of scopes to improve. It is the duty of parents, teachers, and students to work together and shape education into an activity that fun, interactive and helps them develop into good human beings. Only then can our country look up to a bright future.
