The present education system makes the students illiterate

When I think about this, a fable that I read as a child comes to me.
Once upon a time, the animals decided that they must do something heroic to meet the challenges of the new world. So they organized a school. The curriculum consisted of running, climbing, swimming and flying and all the animals were to take all the subjects.
The duck was excellent in swimming, in fact, even better than his instructor but performed poorly in flying and running. Being slow at running, it had to stay after school and also drop swimming to practice running. This continued till its webbed-feet were badly worn and now it got merely an average at swimming. The squirrel got a straight A in climbing but was frustrated in the flying class as it kept on falling from the tree top! The rabbit scored well in running but had a nervous breakdown while desperately trying to swim. At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim very well, and also climb, fly and run a little was given the first rank.

Does this story have a moral?
Obviously, it is the replica of our present education system. In the name of overall development, we have perhaps lost the focus on individuality. Many of you here might be good at particular sport say rugby, some might be geniuses at creating computer games, and some maybe good at a subject like say paleontology. But you can’t pursue it as a career in India at least. Even if you want to, you need to have the security of a degree to go ahead. And what exactly does this security offer? A student who has graduated from the renowned College of Commerce can’t even decipher the budget!
Mark Twain, creator of the character Tom Sawyer”, a favorite with children and adults alike has this to say,” In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice, then he made school boards.”

Another flaw of our system is the importance given to marks. At the time of exam results, I see young faces glittering with achievement. 80% is nothing, 85% is nothing, and very soon, even 90% will be nothing. I don’t deny that the students of today are very hardworking and intelligent, but do they really like what they study?
Let’s have a hypothetical situation, if the compulsory attendance system is scraped, most of us including myself would not attend lectures. Obviously I would rather sit at home studying at my own pace and ease than coming to college to hear the professor giving monotonous lectures and numerical figures which I am sure I’ll forget the very next day being hammered into my head !!
A liking after all doesn’t just come out of thin air. It is to be acquired and nurtured with the actual process of living. The result is evident in what we see today- while every year, many students stream out of IITs and IIMs and other educational institutes-the civil services, public utilities, the police, the judiciary, and the municipality all continue to function dismally.

GK Chesterton has put it in his essay “The 12 Men”, he says that
‘When a society requires a man to be sent on the moon or the depths of the sea to be explored, it calls upon the specialists. But when it wishes to do anything serious, it collects 12 of the ordinary men standing around. The same thing done by Gandhi and most other great leaders of the world. Then what do we need all this education for?
In Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, I distinctly remember the dodo saying that
‘Why the best way to explain it is to do it’
Practical education is something that needs to be made more popular. We teach our BSc students the chemical formula of plastic, its merits and demerits and how it is harmful for the environment, but the very next moment, you see these very students coming out of the canteen tossing plastic cups all around. Isn’t that ironical!

Rather than giving a student a statement and asking him to accept it, he/she should be given a situation and asked to reflect upon it, and then make his own convictions and decisions. But in our system, if a student asks a question which is out of course, pat comes the reply,

‘Beta yeh to exams nahin puchenge, so you take these notes, Xerox them and mug them , then you will get a first-class in exams !!’ I think if we do not change this system, even if India has 100% literacy by the year 2020 or 2040 or whatever Mr. Murli Manohar Joshi has predicted, it would be of no use. Maybe at that time the song by the heavy metal band ‘Pink Floyd’ which was famous during the 60s, ‘We don’t need no education’ would make a grand comeback!!

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