Education System – is it really so bad?

Our educational institutes teach children every subject in the prescribed syllabus, but stop short of teaching young minds how to stop competing with others and begin competing with oneself over time! Improving one’s own performance is a better strategy, rather than competing with others in your class or school. Even the first-ranked student in a school of moderate standing finds great deal of difficulty in getting admission into a top-class college! That is why we read about students committing suicides in spite of getting high percentages – they still don’t make it to their dream colleges or preferred courses and consider themselves as failures. Sadly, our institutions do not teach our young ones how to cope with failure – nor does it train them on how to set realistic achievable goals!

Firstly, schools do not have any plan for sensitive handling of weaker students, except to expel failed students to achieve 100% success rate for the school’s performance. There is no Plan B here. Secondly, there is too much experimentation happening in the field of education in every aspect of education, be it the syllabus, the format of the examination, the method of admissions to courses, and so on. Students are made guinea pigs. Worse the results of their experiments are not made available to any of the lay public! Thirdly, the manner in which educational boards and universities are functioning is deteriorating rapidly. Exams get postponed because of question papers not printed, wrong papers distributed, rumours about paper leaks – just about any mishap that one can think of.

Matters are not going to change until authorities running the educational institutes become more sensitive to student’s anxieties and treat them like their customers. Surely these young students deserve a lot better educational system. I would like to conclude with my admiration for the great job that teachers are doing in our country, without much recognition – and in spite of the raw deal they are handed out in the form of comparatively less and delayed salaries. But for them, the scales would have been tilted just one way – you know which!