What have we done to our education system....?

It is almost depressing the state in which our education system is in these days. There are seeds that I recognize from the past, seeds of evil that have now become full frown creepers that have engulfed the point of education. We have gone from an endeavor to learn to an endeavor to some form of a pursuit that just seems to be one of creating meatballs from raw meat. You now begin to see the story Pink Floyd was telling in the famous video of The Wall. We have confused the meaning of education with the need to produce hundreds of thousands of identical templates that the industry demands. And none of the industries are performing any better for it.

I remember, back in the days, days that the educated these days redder top as those without the level of competition faced these days, there were actually those of us who knew how to put our"education" to use. I was an electrical engineer and I was actually able to design a motor or generator and maybe even build it with the right tools. I was on conversation with one of my very very junior colleagues and in the heat of the moment I have him parameters to show me the design of an induction motor. The man, took a piece of paper and scribbled a bunch of formula and after a long effort conceded that it had been a while since the exams and he was our of touch. Now that makes for a rather bad engineer.

And from his working, I surmised that the key problem was the excessive templatization of education. And then I spent a few more days talking to some of the new outcomes of an education system with the heritage of India. In my travels, even the people who still believe that the chief mode of transportation in the sub continent is over domesticated beasts, know that the Indian intellect far supersedes that of the average Westerner.

I see the plague of an ever expanding syllabus, compounded by an ever deteriorating quality of staff, which is successfully exploited by an ever growing network of private tuition providers. I always had difficulty sitting amidst a score of pupils being fed something but these days, from what I hear, the approach comes with guaranteed results. And case studies for public displays.

Here is a student or a parent's approach to education ad I see it evolving.

STEP 1: Send your kid to a good school. Funny how the correlation of a good school and an expensive school works out! These days are marked with an integration of expensive gadgets into the education framework too. Back in the day, a scientific calculator was all that we saw for a very long time. Anyways, a good school does not engage in good quality learning but only add a certain but of polish. You learn how to wear a tie, tie your shoes and a global language to complain and fret in.

STEP 2: Send the kids through a struggle of tuitions to help them pass exams. Write like this or draw like that to maximize the numerator. This is where the dependence on templates kicks on. And supported by the examination system, it becomes a necessary narcotic.

STEP 3: Once he or she passes school with not much knowledge, beg, borrow our steal to send the kid to an engineering or medical college. Supported by the ever increasing demand for "engineers", this is the key to success!

STEP 4: Go through another round of tuitions because, that is what the kid is used to. Without a pricey tuition regimen, the kid has not learnt of another way to learn.

STEP 5: If you still have the enthusiasm, go for a further degree or jump into the wagon of thousands of people to get a job that the kid is, ill equipped at best, to do good at. And there are tuitions for that too, getting a job. Thankfully there are no tuitions for the job to be done. Good old On-The-Job training has to suffice. So far.....

What we end up doing is creating a template instead of an intellectual sentient being. So how had all of this resulted in anything of value. For all the man hours and money spent, the output is rather wanting. Pardon me of I do sound like an old hag who thinks that his times were the golden ages but I still believe that depth of knowledge is more rewarding that a whole lot of unprocessed information. No wonder we are gradually becoming the country that washes Western laundry for a living. Innovation seems to need a kind of rigor and passion that is all but lost in the pursuit of qualifications and numerators.

What's the answer? I don't know. Maybe population control! All I know it's that this is not the right path. With what we have today, the right path of education should yield higher end goals than we see.