When it comes to the quality of higher education in India the mushrooming of medical colleges, engineering colleges and management schools has certainly not provided a solution and the products they continue to push out at the end of every academic session are neither employable nor useful for nation building. If this is the state of affairs in these new institutions then what are the old and established ones doing? Are they any better? Do they stand a chance to compete with the best in the world? Let us get a reality check.
India has five institutions in the top 50 and nine in the top 100 among the top 350 Universities across 17 countries, as per the QS University Rankings Asia 2016. In the BRICS Rankings 2016, India continues to hold its position in the top 10 with IISC at Rank No. 6. India has eight institutions in the top 50 which is the same as Russia and one more than Brazil. From 31 institutions in the rankings last year, India today has 44 institutions in the top 250 of the QS BRICS Rankings 2016. The University of Delhi has taken a lead by rising from 46 last year to 41 this year.
So, the established institutions are not exactly trail blazing success stories. The question is ‘Why’? We have poured in resources but why have we not got the value for our money? Our past Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh summed up our higher education system as sea of institutionalized mediocrity with a few islands of excellence. I cannot agree more. The problem is multi-dimensional and there are four factors which need our attention – students, teachers, syllabus and the system.
Students: The students who are graduating from our primary and secondary education system are either a product of mass copying and cheating or experts in cramming up and regurgitating for examinations. Rote learning still plagues our system, students study only to score marks in exams, and sometimes to crack exams like IIT JEE, AIIMS or CLAT. The colonial masters introduced education systems in India to create clerks and civil servants, and we have not deviated much from that pattern till today. If once the youngsters prepared en masse for civil services and bank officers exams, they now prepare to become engineers, doctors and lawyers. The mind numbing competition and rote learning do not only crush the creativity and originality of millions of Indian students every year; it also drives brilliant students to commit suicide.
Teachers: Teachers are Nation builders but do they get the recognition for being that. In a materialistic world, where success is gauged only by the size of the bank balance, where is the poor teacher today? Money, power and position in society have all bypassed him/her and barring a few exceptions, he / she stands stripped of all dignity and prestige. If we continue to pay our teachers peanuts we will only attract monkeys for these jobs. Gone are the days of Prof. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan and Prof. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the best in a class aspire to be administrative officers, engineers, doctors but not teachers any more. Higher education is heavily dependent of excellent teachers, who can guide high quality research, and it is not surprising to find that in this system ‘research’ is the worst victim. If teachers cannot imagine it their students will never become it and so it is absolutely essential to attract the very best in this profession. Good teachers need not be restricted to their own small institutions, we can, in this day and age of internet, share them not only with all those institutions which lack good teachers, but virtually with the rest of the world! We need leaders, entrepreneurs in teaching positions, not salaried people trying to hold on to their jobs by marking their attendance.
Syllabus: What we teach today will decide how we compete tomorrow. The syllabus should have two distinct parts – a fixed section of hard core basics and an ever changing section of what the market demands. The market is dynamic, it is always changing and if the graduate programme is unaware of the market place it will invariably produce a bunch of unemployables. The goal of our new syllabus should be to create entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, scientists, thinkers and writers who can establish the foundation of a knowledge based economy rather than the low-quality service provider nation that we are turning into. Why should we be happy Bangaloring jobs from the U.S? When will we start outsourcing our not so smart jobs to the not so smart countries? Why do we spend billions of dollars buying ammunitions, fighter jets and radars from U.S, France, U.K and Israel? How come their syllabus and their system taught them to make all these smart stuff, while our system was busy in campus politics and succeeded in producing only ‘netas’?
System: Education system in India is failing because of more intrinsic reasons. We live in a country where the people see education as the means of climbing the social and economic ladder. My tailor has paid Rs. 21 lacs for a degree in dental sciences for his daughter, not to make her practice dentistry but to make her more eligible for marriage. If the education system is failing – then it is certainly not due to lack of demand for good education, or because a market for education does not exist. There are systemic faults that do not let our demand for good education translate into a great marketplace with excellent education services.
We may have the most number of engineering graduates in the world, but that certainly has not translated into much technological innovation here. Rather, we are busy running the call centres of the rest of the world – that is where our engineering skills end. This is not excellence. We have set the bar so low that we will never be able to compete with the world. Until and unless we encourage innovation and research, creativity and originality and go out hunting for patents we will remain copiers and assembly workers for the world. We have to encourage risk takers, they will not succeed always, but when they will they can create Internet, Smart phones, Facebook and Hotmail!
Still India is in the top 10 Research producing nations globally. In a decade and a half, India has produced over 1.4 million Research Papers attracting a massive 8.5 million citations (7.4 citations per paper). During the same period, the Indian Scientific Community filed 4.6 Lacs Patent applications. A total of 1, 29,481 scientific papers were published by Indian authors in 2015, but the question is of quality......how many of them were path breaking?
We have tolerated mediocrity for far too long. Our education system will remain sub-par or mediocre until we make it clear that it is not ok to be mediocre. If we want excellence, mediocrity cannot be tolerated. Mediocrity has to be discarded as an option. We have to put some fire under the seat of mediocre students and mediocre teachers and make them function to their fullest potential. Accountability should be non-negotiable. With internet reaching our villages, for a country as big and as varied as India, distant learning is the way to go ahead. This will make good education, imparted by good educators, universally available and this is the only way reservation will become irrelevant. If a religious preacher in Middle East, by his hateful teachings can pollute the minds and hearts of so many young men and women in this sub-continent using distant learning of sorts, why can’t the good, the useful, the precious use the same medium and make India more imaginative, more inquisitive, more purposeful and more educated?
President Pronob Mukherjee is of the opinion that "Education as the alchemy can bring India its next golden age," Our first citizen has given us the key to the key to the next golden age, are we going to use it to open the deadlock?
India has five institutions in the top 50 and nine in the top 100 among the top 350 Universities across 17 countries, as per the QS University Rankings Asia 2016. In the BRICS Rankings 2016, India continues to hold its position in the top 10 with IISC at Rank No. 6. India has eight institutions in the top 50 which is the same as Russia and one more than Brazil. From 31 institutions in the rankings last year, India today has 44 institutions in the top 250 of the QS BRICS Rankings 2016. The University of Delhi has taken a lead by rising from 46 last year to 41 this year.
So, the established institutions are not exactly trail blazing success stories. The question is ‘Why’? We have poured in resources but why have we not got the value for our money? Our past Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh summed up our higher education system as sea of institutionalized mediocrity with a few islands of excellence. I cannot agree more. The problem is multi-dimensional and there are four factors which need our attention – students, teachers, syllabus and the system.
Students: The students who are graduating from our primary and secondary education system are either a product of mass copying and cheating or experts in cramming up and regurgitating for examinations. Rote learning still plagues our system, students study only to score marks in exams, and sometimes to crack exams like IIT JEE, AIIMS or CLAT. The colonial masters introduced education systems in India to create clerks and civil servants, and we have not deviated much from that pattern till today. If once the youngsters prepared en masse for civil services and bank officers exams, they now prepare to become engineers, doctors and lawyers. The mind numbing competition and rote learning do not only crush the creativity and originality of millions of Indian students every year; it also drives brilliant students to commit suicide.
Teachers: Teachers are Nation builders but do they get the recognition for being that. In a materialistic world, where success is gauged only by the size of the bank balance, where is the poor teacher today? Money, power and position in society have all bypassed him/her and barring a few exceptions, he / she stands stripped of all dignity and prestige. If we continue to pay our teachers peanuts we will only attract monkeys for these jobs. Gone are the days of Prof. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan and Prof. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the best in a class aspire to be administrative officers, engineers, doctors but not teachers any more. Higher education is heavily dependent of excellent teachers, who can guide high quality research, and it is not surprising to find that in this system ‘research’ is the worst victim. If teachers cannot imagine it their students will never become it and so it is absolutely essential to attract the very best in this profession. Good teachers need not be restricted to their own small institutions, we can, in this day and age of internet, share them not only with all those institutions which lack good teachers, but virtually with the rest of the world! We need leaders, entrepreneurs in teaching positions, not salaried people trying to hold on to their jobs by marking their attendance.
Syllabus: What we teach today will decide how we compete tomorrow. The syllabus should have two distinct parts – a fixed section of hard core basics and an ever changing section of what the market demands. The market is dynamic, it is always changing and if the graduate programme is unaware of the market place it will invariably produce a bunch of unemployables. The goal of our new syllabus should be to create entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, scientists, thinkers and writers who can establish the foundation of a knowledge based economy rather than the low-quality service provider nation that we are turning into. Why should we be happy Bangaloring jobs from the U.S? When will we start outsourcing our not so smart jobs to the not so smart countries? Why do we spend billions of dollars buying ammunitions, fighter jets and radars from U.S, France, U.K and Israel? How come their syllabus and their system taught them to make all these smart stuff, while our system was busy in campus politics and succeeded in producing only ‘netas’?
System: Education system in India is failing because of more intrinsic reasons. We live in a country where the people see education as the means of climbing the social and economic ladder. My tailor has paid Rs. 21 lacs for a degree in dental sciences for his daughter, not to make her practice dentistry but to make her more eligible for marriage. If the education system is failing – then it is certainly not due to lack of demand for good education, or because a market for education does not exist. There are systemic faults that do not let our demand for good education translate into a great marketplace with excellent education services.
We may have the most number of engineering graduates in the world, but that certainly has not translated into much technological innovation here. Rather, we are busy running the call centres of the rest of the world – that is where our engineering skills end. This is not excellence. We have set the bar so low that we will never be able to compete with the world. Until and unless we encourage innovation and research, creativity and originality and go out hunting for patents we will remain copiers and assembly workers for the world. We have to encourage risk takers, they will not succeed always, but when they will they can create Internet, Smart phones, Facebook and Hotmail!
Still India is in the top 10 Research producing nations globally. In a decade and a half, India has produced over 1.4 million Research Papers attracting a massive 8.5 million citations (7.4 citations per paper). During the same period, the Indian Scientific Community filed 4.6 Lacs Patent applications. A total of 1, 29,481 scientific papers were published by Indian authors in 2015, but the question is of quality......how many of them were path breaking?
We have tolerated mediocrity for far too long. Our education system will remain sub-par or mediocre until we make it clear that it is not ok to be mediocre. If we want excellence, mediocrity cannot be tolerated. Mediocrity has to be discarded as an option. We have to put some fire under the seat of mediocre students and mediocre teachers and make them function to their fullest potential. Accountability should be non-negotiable. With internet reaching our villages, for a country as big and as varied as India, distant learning is the way to go ahead. This will make good education, imparted by good educators, universally available and this is the only way reservation will become irrelevant. If a religious preacher in Middle East, by his hateful teachings can pollute the minds and hearts of so many young men and women in this sub-continent using distant learning of sorts, why can’t the good, the useful, the precious use the same medium and make India more imaginative, more inquisitive, more purposeful and more educated?
President Pronob Mukherjee is of the opinion that "Education as the alchemy can bring India its next golden age," Our first citizen has given us the key to the key to the next golden age, are we going to use it to open the deadlock?
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