Hello,
In this post I am going to highlight and pen down few
fundamental flaws of higher education system in an easy-to-digest manner for
the minds. Here I have attempted to describe few core issues, and will be
making a case as to why, by the year 2030, none
of the Indian educational institutions will be in top-20 or 50 or even in the
top-200 universities in the world.
Fundamental Flaw No-1: Factory Model of Education
Sir Ken Robinson, in his brilliant TED
Talk, described the biasness of our education system towards producing industry
centric outcomes. In his words, “the
whole education system was designed to fulfill the needs of the industrial
revolution”. He’s right. We do classify our students in batches, process
their learning in a manner similar to what is done in a typical factory’s
assembly line. Defective parts are generally chucked out with marginal attempts
to recover their value in the final product. Figures show rise in the
percentage of students who drop-out or commit suicide because they can’t cope
up with the mind-bending realities of the educational system [1].
In the past, if you had a degree then you
could easily land a job, now degrees are everywhere. Economic realities of
educational system is producing academic inflation. Therefore, the value of
degrees have fallen down substantially over the last few decades to the point
that corporate houses have started to overlook qualifications due to the
industry-academia gap. Finally, the output from current factory model of
education is, quite literally, a big zero.
Lack of employability is a major concern across India [2].
Fundamental Flaw No-2: Lack of Understanding of Human
Creativity and Learning
Humans as intellectual creatures develop
themselves organically. They learn from their mistakes and become better overtime
with experience. Education system on the other side, by virtue of being split
into varied levels of education, produces a nasty consequence where it expects
certain level of pre-existing academic ability from a student. Anyone not
having the required academic ability suffers tremendously and is further pushed
down the pipe labelled as a ‘poor’ or ‘below average’ student.
Furthermore, there is very little attention
given to human creativity during the learning process. Imagine a student is
able to reach an answer to a question, the evaluative judgment for marks is
mostly based on the given final outcome, i.e. the accuracy of the answer. We lack
a better tool to judge ‘how’ that student resolved the internal ambiguities of
his mind and creatively reached the conclusive answer. There is no measure
employed or devised to be used at this massive scale for measuring an individual’s
creativity. In fact, on the contrary a
creative individual can be perceived as a non-conformist or ‘poor’ student.
Fundamental Flaw No-3: Knowledge delivery and Meritocratic
Measurements of Academic Ability
To understand this, If you think of education
system as a delivery vehicle for
disseminating scientific knowledge. If you compare it to any religion, you’re
going to have to conclude that religions outperform our education system in
terms of effectiveness and learning outcomes.
Religions do something quite similar in a much more effective way than
the education systems. Utilizing most senses of mind/body to deliver the
message they intend to deliver using auditory, visual, and verbal means
exceptionally well to engage and disseminate knowledge from scriptures.
Furthermore, they utilize celestial events to impart daily discipline and
employ concept of communicative repetition for reiterating or reinforcing the prescribed
teachings to their followers. Almost seems too good to be true, but religions employ better and varied knowledge delivery mechanisms than our current
education system.
For lack of a better way to find out
whether or not a human has learned the knowledge, we have put the evaluation
systems to strictly measure the elusive
academic ability. Beneath lies the idea of meritocratic academic achievement, which states that only those
human should rise in societal hierarchy who possess the most amount of academic
ability. The Reality, however, is much different as there aren’t many top
businessmen, politicians, and successful wealthy humans who became who they are
today just ‘because’ of their academic ability. Honestly, If you look around, you’re more likely to find someone successful
‘because’ they didn’t take education system’s promises seriously than those who
had stick to it, and in the end, couldn’t achieve success as they once wished
for.
Fundamental Flaw No-4: Lack of standard metric to gauge
ROI from investment in formal education
Purpose of the
higher education system is to equip us with required knowledge, skills, and
competencies and help us progress into the future that we can’t grasp today. People
invest massively in the education system while at the same time no one has a
clue how the world will look-like in coming 5 years, obviously everyone is
supposed be educated for it.
Preparing for
future isn’t necessarily a bad strategy. But the key question is whether you
are better off without the long-term investment in educating yourself? The answer to this question lie in analyzing
Return-On-Investment using a standard method. This standard method of measuring ROI is missing.
Thank you for reading and I hope you’ll
find this post useful and I will post more about our education system in the
future. In case if you wish to add any
additional point to the post, then please leave a comment below.