Our education system is one of the oldest methods of attaining knowledge in this world. But it has a huge number of distortion and deviations. History has made it a habit of influencing each and every thing that crosses its way. When our education system crossed history’s path, it deviated a bit from its own path each and every time.
In the Vedic age, our education system consisted of a Guru, his disciples and a holy Gurukul. It was this place where the Guru taught his students each and every aspect of life along with subject matters. But this education system was confined to a special sect of Brahmins and Kshatriyas.
As we developed and our society grew up, the necessity of education was observed. Hence the people started educating their children. The society’s mentality was influenced by people like Swami Dayanand Saraswati, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekanand and many more. Many schools were opened in British India which imparted state of the art education and also they used to instil in the minds of their students a sense of nationalistic attitude.
It was the time when a British scholar was sent to India well known as Lord Macaulay to look after the education system as well as its development and research in India. It was his duty to inculcate and engross the history of India and develop a syllabus of important events to be taught to Indian students. So he formed a pattern and syllabus along with his team, which would be taught to the Indians.
It was a welcome step at that time because it was the first time when the British had shown a resolve to improve and enhance Indian education system. But a section of Indian scholars had reservation against this decision as they feared the British would distort our history and deprive us of true knowledge. Unfortunately their fear turned out to be a nightmare for us which still haunts us and acts as a hindrance in our development.
After Independence, the government that was selected by us and for us had a chance to rectify this mistake and deliver us the actual knowledge that we were actually entitled to. Instead, the governments that came to power one after another twisted and turned the history to enhance their own political mileage. Instead of completely revamping the education system that would be required for our own progress, the governments made allocations in budget to open more schools. The corruption was so huge that even the schools opened could not be managed well, leave apart restructuring the education system. The teachers are not up to the mark and they have no intention to contribute for developing the society and in turn the country. Every other day we get the news of corruption in induction of teachers in government schools. If the Guru himself is not loyal to his job and responsibilities, how will he make his disciples follow the same?
Today India’s literacy rate is more than 64%. We have a huge workforce. We have the world’s largest batch of engineers worldwide. We have highest number of graduates in the world. If we look at the manpower, we are at the top. But are we really at the top? I don’t think so. The education system in India is such that we are taught to recite and not learn.
We are not qualified graduates but we are the trained graduates. That is why we have a huge services sector and it is progressing. Our country has very less number of patents and research and development in our country is a far cry. This education system teaches us to score marks but not to score intellect. Every year we see the cut-offs of competitive examinations reach almost the ceiling value. Are we really brilliant or we train ourselves to reach this spot. The answer is very simple and it needs to be introspected as to what the government should do to improve the education system which separates top scores with new and genuine knowledge.
The whole education system should be revamped to impart true and genuine knowledge to our youth. We should not be trained instead we should be taught. Instead of making us recite things, we should be taught to think of new ideas and implement them in the problems of daily life to make use of the knowledge. Even a lion learns to perform activities in a circus. That lion is called well trained and not well educated.
A silver lining over this cloud is that the latest government has made provisions to develop intellectual property of a person and aid him accordingly to carry on his researches for the betterment of the mankind. A lot of steps have been taken to improve the intellect of our youth. The government has also shown signs of being a precursor in revamping and remodelling of our education system to extract maximum results out of it. Moreover digitalization will also play a major role in educating and imparting knowledge to all be it passed outs, drop outs or of different streams. We welcome these steps and hope our government would make reforms to improve our ageing and detoriating education system which would again make us the teacher of the world as we were famous in the past.
