Ends and Means of the Indian Education System

By: Anirban Paul.

To scrupulously dissect the Indian education, it will be easier if the process is reversed, that is, if the dissection starts at the end and then goes towards the roots of the structure itself.

The end determines the means. In context of the education system in the country, that basically means that the jobs with the most money determines what subjects students opt for and, consequently, which streams of study get the most funding. While establishing a hundred new IITs becomes a mass political bribe, talking about integrated courses in pure and applied science or History only garners some nasty snares and deep indifference.

The problem here is twofold - the Indian mentality has evolved in poverty and as a people, for decades now, we have associated engineering and medicine with wealth and profound respect. And that seems to be true, to an extent, but only because we make it so. More than 80% of the funding for education (which is only 3.4% of the GDP) is spent on engineering and medical colleges, which also makes sense, since more than 80 percent of our students opt for either engineering or medicine. What we have as a result is a bubble that has to burst. What that means is that for now, it is safe to swim with the current but after a certain saturation point (which we may already be closing in on) there will be more engineers and doctors than there are jobs for their particular skill sets. What that means, in real terms, is that companies won't be looking for people who are good at what they do, just people who will work for lesser and lesser money. While doctors may still be shielded from this inevitability to some extent, a majority of engineers are bound to face this conundrum in years to come.

The Indian Education System - Manufacturing (ill)literates.

However, the issue is not so much with the opportunities that engineering provides or its value as such. The predictions considering these unforeseeable advancements in the field may be completely wrong. The real issue is the disservice it has done to its elder brother - 'pure science'. Pure science is a dying prospect for the brightest minds of the country. Clearly, while landing a spacecraft on Mars is commendable in its own right, it does more to create a false impression of bravado in the fragile Indian ego than to actually contribute to the scientific progress of the intelligent community of the human race. We lack a fundamental understanding of physics and cosmology, in specific, because our entire curriculum has been modified to suit the needs of engineering colleges and, subsequently, multinationals.

Let's move backwards to higher secondary education. In many ways, this is the defining moment in the hierarchy of education and students are for the first time allowed to choose a stream and it is always the same story regardless of where you look - the brightest students will be sent to Science, while the rest will be declared to be unfit for its rigours and relegated to arts or commerce. This is the most dastardly horrendous irrationality in the entire education system. The students who select science, or in many cases are forcibly dragged towards it, will invariably have decided to become engineers or doctors before they even realize what those professions entail. If by some accidental anomaly in the fabric of destiny, a student decides he'd rather go into research, God have mercy on his soul. For, in the following years, his resolve will be systematically broken and he will be force fed information that has been designed specifically for engineering students by national boards of education. This is obvious because it's also a necessity.

In order to maintain the aforementioned bubble, we have to build engineers early and we can't waste time teaching them about things that won't get them seats in IITs and jobs in multinational companies. We don't care about all the progress being made at the CERN large hadron collider or the insight we are continually gaining into the workings of the universe from Dark Matter to Quantum entanglement because no one makes crores of rupees studying Relativity and Quantum mechanics. To be fair, these subjects are taught later in engineering colleges but seldom have any real value in their professions; they're pretty much just there in case one out of a billion decides to be a rocket scientist. In such a circumstance, where students are so streamlined by a social hype and blind-sided by the lack of awareness of the true scope of the subject they are studying, there's a cattle line for engineering colleges and not enough for institutes for pure and applied sciences like NISER or IISER. Also coming back to the point of selecting streams according to the percentage of marks students obtain in their metric exams, it is deeply distressing that we decide that one stream is above all the others and populate it with whom we consider bright students.

'We' refers to the combined entity of both society and educational institutions. It is incredibly obtuse (no pun intended) to think that someone who may not have got a ninety five in mathematics should not go on to get a degree in it if he or she wants to. Newton himself was a vehemently mediocre student in college and he invented calculus out of nothing but boredom. So how do We decide if someone is good enough for a particular subject based on an inaccurate measure of his or her intelligence? Conversely, if someone who has scored a perfect score in mathematics wants to major in Psychology, it's no one's business to stop him or her. Why does our choice of subject need to be defined by these three factors: money, marks and social approval?

Just this year, however, the tides seem to be changing. With this shared detest of engineering, more and more students are branching out into alternative fields of study, as epitomized by the rush of applicants for Delhi University colleges for the past few years. However, two points need to be brought up here: firstly, the system still isn't conducive to students who would like to take up off-stream careers since the scope of these fields is restricted due to political will and funding. Secondly, at the risk of sounding hypocritical, for many, choosing alternative career paths is simply an attempt to seem like they're not a part of the 'common herd'. That has never been a part of this argument. The belief that people who are genuinely interested in engineering will make great engineers is at the base of the argument. Making a career choice should not be a fashion statement. To decide what field of study suits a student's interests rather than which field of study would make him the richest needs to be promoted.

Although, up until now, this rant may seem like a scathing attack on engineering, it should not be construed as such. Engineering is being attacked here because Engineering has become the norm at present. It still has its merits when it comes to students who are genuinely intrigued by it.

To come to the root of the problem, let's look at the base of the entire education system - the school system. The school system in India is atrocious. Let us start off the bat by acknowledging the two main school boards - CBSE and ICSE - apart from several other state boards. CBSE has become a glorified joke at this point after the introduction of the CGPA marking system. It was a political gimmick and it has stayed as such. There is no structure and there is simply no real objectivity to how these grades are given. Students are marked on their tests, creativity and their involvement in co-curricular activities. Sure, Teachers are subjectively going to grade students on how well they draw or how hard they can kick a football. They might as well just grade them on how many eyelashes they have. CBSE has realised this and introduced midterm and term end examinations in the form of standardized tests which are supposed to be optional but are not really. Anyway, everyone passes and everyone is a 10-pointer until they come to the higher secondary section and all their false sense of invincibility goes to hell. CBSE text books are horrendous. Considering the fact that we have the NCERT that's supposed to be maintaining the quality of education through well-phrased concise text books, it is amazing how these text books can be so bad. They're just pages after pages of irrelevant information that confuse more than explain. The issue should not be whether or not Sanskrit should be taught instead of German; rather, the issue should be whether our children actually learn anything at all from these freakishly nonsensical text books.

In this respect, ICSE has an advantage but only because it does not prescribe any text books at all, only syllabi. Teachers are free to prescribe any text book from a list of publications. While this does raise the question of uniformity, the discrepancy in the quality of education is negligible because of the clarity of the syllabi themselves. In this case, ICSE schools definitely hold the edge over CBSE schools and are probably the better option on the whole.

Now coming to state boards, commenting on the intricacies of the quality of the education they provide is difficult but it should not be too far from the truth if we assumed that they generally follow the CBSE pattern. However, more certainly, the marking in state boards is notoriously infamous and ranges from both extremes. West Bengal is known for its parsimonious attitude when it comes to marks and the state boards of UP and Tamil Nadu usually inflate to ridiculous extents. CBSE tends to inflate marks as well. This isn't a frivolous issue. For JEE and other engineering entrances, the marks are usually calculated using percentages and medians and that create a fair level ground but for students who'd like to pursue other courses and streams, whatever marks they get is absolute. They just have to deal with it.

It's just not fair and it's irksome that we still haven't figured out a fair standard of marking for what we in India know to be the defining numbers of our careers. It's simply absurd.

Lastly, the bane of our education system - government schools. Government schools are where education goes to cry alone in a corner. The sad irony is that government schools are supposed to provide quality education for free according to our Constitution but instead they are a rat hole bereft of basic infrastructure, overflowing with students and composed of inefficient teachers with shady credentials. No government has ever taken up the question of government schools seriously enough because it doesn't affect them anyway. Yet, government schools are what much of the country's population actually rely on for an education.

As mentioned before, only 3.4 percent of the total budget is spent on education in this country. Only a fraction of that money is spent on government schools. This is our biggest fallacy. Looking at these issues in reverse order, going from the postgraduate studies a the way back to the school education is to highlight the condition of these government school students. These students seem to hardly matter to the HRD ministry. They hardly matter to anyone at all. And yet, they make up the largest chunk of our youth. And to put this into perspective, it will do us good to remember that Michael Faraday was a poor glassmaker with no education until he was taken into the care of a benevolent benefactor. So how many Newtons, Einsteins, Faradays, Maxwells, Shakespeares, Dostoyveskys and Darwins are we missing out on simply because we can't care enough to strengthen the roots of our education system?

Anirban Paul is a journalism and communication student at Manipal University.