OUR STUDENTS AND OUR EDUCATION, BOTH NEED TO CHANGE

 

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024, released in early 2025, showed learning recovery in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, a decline in government school enrolment from pandemic highs, and increased smartphone ownership among rural children. While learning outcomes are improving, a significant portion of children still face challenges with foundational literacy and numeracy, and a majority of teenagers use smartphones primarily for social media rather than education. 

 

Now here lies the problem - education is all that remains after we have forgotten every bookish lesson taught in schools. But, when chalk was replaced by click, and distant education was formalised as the new normal, if student found stupid social media reels more interesting than the teaching material, the purpose of laptop and smartphone got defeated. Instead of a teaching aid it became a distraction. 

 

So, when we come across students who are oblivious of the world around them and things which we club under 'general knowledge' like names of capitals of states and countries, important people and events from history, names of chief ministers, prime minister and president, are not on their finger tips, then you know there is a problem. What is their logic - why remember when you can Google? But is this education on Google crutches truly enough?

 

There is an entire generation of graduates and would be graduates who have stopped thinking. Consequently, they are unable to understand, analyse and communicate. The malady started with the calculator, which made multiplication tables redundant. The smartphone has now made the book redundant and today the source of knowledge is in the unfiltered Internet. The attention span of our students is less than that of a goldfish, and so reading a book is simply not in fashion anymore. The AI is only going to make it worse and take away the minimum originality that remains with individual students. Chetan Bhagat very poignantly says 'if some students drink at the fountains of knowledge, most are just doing gargle.'

 

Education is an instrument by which we align our tomorrows with our yesterdays and todays. This is a giant experiment in time - we use the present to distil the wisdom of the past, so as to prepare ourselves for the future. As the future changes rapidly it produces enormous strain on our education pattern as it has to change with changing times. Yet, education remains the most sluggish moving sector in our country, crippled on either sides - afraid to take newer steps to the future and forgetting to reap benefits from the past. Knowledge today is not just coming from books and teachers but from various other sources - Internet, YouTube, social media and AI. It is today curiosity driven and no more institutional and agenda driven. The students needs to take the responsibility of enriching themselves in the best way, from the best source, in the best time, but are our students mature enough to understand this challenge?

 

Simply knowing facts about a subject and reproducing them successfully in an examination is no more enough. The subject needs thorough understanding and knowledge from other sources needs to be sifted through, perhaps with a mentor / teacher to become a master of the subject. Education today is expected to teach students how to learn better, think more critically and how to use knowledge more meaningfully, and not merely pass an examination. This pie chart made by Dr. Jenifer Summers sums it all up beautifully:

 

As if this was not enough the idea that education is a one time 15 years slog and what we learn during this period will serve us a lifetime, no more holds true today. Students have to constantly upskill and supplement their pool of knowledge to keep pace with the changing technology. Education is a lifelong process today. Knowledge moves quickly and obsolescence sets in fast. Education is freeing itself from purely utilitarian perspective, and is being embraced for its own sake, rather than only a means of landing a job.

 

We perhaps produce more students than food grains but employers will tell you that most of them are unemployable. Rote learning and mass copying have given them a degree but no skills, physical or mental. They all want to get quickly rich, but have no idea how! There is a frightening level of incompetence amongst these graduates, both urban and rural, and no amount of skill development programmes and industry internship will work, if their brain has outsourced the job of thinking to the internet and now AI.

 

Make no mistake, our top students who are qualifying from IITs, IIMs, AIIMSs are the best in the world, but they comprise a miniscule minority, and they are unfortunately our best exports which historically have worked to make America great! We are left with the students in the middle of the curve, and their overindulgence in meaningless social media has made them unintelligent and unemployable. 

 

Internet is not the only culprit. The father/mother and son/daughter interaction at home, across the dining table is replaced by dinner in front of the TV. When and how are parents doing the serious business of parenting? Why have the grandparents, if they are staying together, not reading stories from epics like Ramayana, Mahabharata and Panchatantra? When we were children we had an image of Ayodhya and Lanka, which we were made to imagine. The image of Abhimanyu inside the Chakravhieu or Ghatotkatch on the battlefield was not created by Sri B.R. Chopra for me but my grandmother. Why are these interactions suddenly out of fashion?

 

Without these interactions, a young mind is not introduced to our culture and to our civilization. That empty space gets filled by Cartoon Network, Disney and Nicklodean and the McDonald and Pizza Hut come as sponsors on their piggyback. This upbringing makes children intellectually stagnant and the seeds of under-achievement are sown right in childhood. There is no inspiration, no focus, and no desire to conquer the world, excel in life, and march towards a meaningful existence. This is a very serious lacuna that has crept into our future generation.

 

India will not become Vikasit Bharat with the improvement of its inanimate infrastructures like smart cities, smart roads and smart cars. We need smart people too, with ability to think critically, act decisively, and construct a better future for themselves and for our country. Education should lead and not follow the scientific advances. It should equip our students for the future and not keep them chained to the past. It must be the domain of outstanding creativity, outrageous ambitions and not merely a slave of habit. For Bharat to become vikasit tomorrow, her youth has to become vikasit today.