The dissatisfaction that we have towards our education system is severe and we are demanding some huge changes in it. Even though our government introduced the ‘New Education Policy’ recently it hasn’t really been up to the mark for a lot of us. People have posted several criticisms on the new policy, and to be frank the policy does look like nothing but a response to all those rants that we post on Instagram against our system.
What is really the fault in our system? The answer is pretty easy to say but a little tough to interpret and develop.
When I was in school I used to hate history because I had to cram up everything in my mind with no reason or understanding whatsoever. I was studying it just for the sake of it, but lately, my interest in history has grown tremendously and I have even started to love it. Now I don’t study history for passing examinations but to know the path we as humans traveled. I thought maybe it had the same love seven years ago that I have towards history right now studying wouldn’t have been that difficult.
That’s when it struck me, the problem with our education system is this phrase ‘just for the sake of it’. I realized there is something fundamentally wrong in our system and I did everything I could to understand it.
Long ago when the British were expanding its territory in India it didn’t have many employees to do the clerical work. It posed a great threat to their expansion and they had to do something about it which is why they decided to literate Indians, mind me I have said ‘literate’ and not ‘educate’. They simply needed employees who are literate enough to take care of the clerical works. That’s when they introduced the STEM system, it provided floor level knowledge on many subjects which the British thought was important for them. They started to educate (literate) Indians, who sometime after became their employees. Well, the history part ends here.
After the British left India, the government made many changes to the education system until the latest New Education Policy 2020. The problem here is that even though there have been several changes in our system the core objective has been the same throughout the years.
What is it? The factor called ‘employability’. Our education system has been designed in such a way that the core objective of it is not to help us understand the skill that we are trying to learn but just cram it enough to get a well-paid job. We spend all our life trying to cram it instead of understanding it or incorporating it. This is why even though there are millions of youngsters who hold a graduation certificate, on one hand, find it difficult to get a call letter in the other. This has created a whole generation of ‘Literate yet unskilled’ people.
We have developed to an age where it is the skills that can help us grow and the certificates. Changing the core objective of our system does not only involve bringing some huge changes to our education system but also convincing the previous generation including our parents and teachers. As much as we would like to put the blame on them, they are what they are because they grew up in the same old system that we have and unfortunately they didn’t have access to the almighty internet that almost all of us have right now.
Only when we break this simple yet complex barrier the changes that we are trying to implement will have an effect. In simple words, our education shouldn’t be ‘just for the sake of it’.
