Au Contraire

India has advanced in educating its population of more than a billion people. It has been realized now that education is both essential and instrumental for economic well-being of individuals and entire nations. But are we going in right direction ?

Education starts at childhood, from primary education.
Primary education in India is subject to two extreme conflicting conditions.

On one hand, millions of young children in lower income groups, especially rural and girl children, comprising nearly 35-40% of entrants never complete primary school. Even among those who do, are left with little or no real learning.

The main reasons being poorly qualified teachers, very high student-teacher ratios, inadequate teaching materials, inadequate infrastructure and sometimes obsolete teaching methods. It is not uncommon for students completing five years of primary schooling in village schools to lack even basic reading and writing skills.

And on the other hand, children vying to get admission in urban premium schools are subjected to extreme competitive pressures from parents and teachers to acquire basic academic skills and memorize huge amounts of information in order to get into these schools. Huge amount of money is spent on each individual.

On one hand we have stars who are raring to shine academically, can take the country to new heights, new horizons but the conditions rein their quest of knowledge and zeal to do something.
And on the other hand we have children from urban background, not all of them bright, their interests lie somewhere else but being pushed to the system.

In both the cases, the children are being pressed against their wishes. Not only small kids at their starting age but the young ones & the teenagers are also pushed against their wishes.

Their interests have no importance, they are asked to study, choose a field which has very little value to them & then get some nice lucrative job.

In my opinion, the ultimate loser is the nation.

In every walk of our life we can find children of both categories. It is pain to see someone very bright working at a dhaba, petrol pump or even as a servant in one of the affluent houses where the son of the house is more interested in playing x-box 360, reading playboy or acting in front of the mirror.

The parents ask (read force) their children to take the subjects of their own choice where THEY think lies the future of the child. Every year lakhs of students sit for competitive exams such as IIT, medical when half of them know in their heart that they won’t be making it. They together spend lakhs in coaching classes whose businesses flourish. And for the lucky ones who make it to one of the institutes, the govt. invests innumerable amount of money on their studies.

Not all of these professionals are interested in their this forced careers then why spend so much effort, time & money ? Why doesn’t the society, the parents leave them to chose what they want to.

I’ll take example of IT sector. Almost all the big companies hire only engineers as their employees. It starts from campus recruitments. But do you think all these engineers are really interested in coding or bug fixing ? NO. Some of them, yes. They come from different branches of engineering and definitely have other aspirations about their careers.
The result ? After working for initial 2-3 years or even less they leave the job to satisfy their own urge. Though now that they have completed their studies, they can not change their field drastically but within the field they try to live their interests. All the investments goes down the drain.

On the other hand, there are some brilliant non engineers who are made for these jobs, who love to be in this sector and will stick to the company also, if taken care of. They are either not taken, or paid very less compared to engineer graduates by these companies.

What do you call this ?

Now, some of the companies have realized this grave mistake and trying to correct it in a small fashion but it’ll also take time.

Just like before investing in stocks we (be it the govt. or the parents) check whether it’ll fetch us fortune or not, why can’t the investments (time, effort, money, resources etc.) be done more wisely in a manner where it will bear the maximum fruit and benefit the future ?

Current song- Aicha, Aicha, Passing Me By – English version