Education System - Innovate or Perish

Continuing the series of posts on Education system, it is my strong opinion that this business has done the cardinal sin of not identifying the Customer.The customer has to be the Child, not the parents.

Let us look at the whole system of Education from a Management perspective.

The objective of any Education system should be to develop the necessary skills of the student, hard and soft, so essential to make him/her a success in his/her life and in his/her job. Hard skills pertain to the subject knowledge and the soft skills are those behavioural skills required by the student to be productive in his/her job.

Our current education system does take care of the hard skills aspect to some extent (this also is debatable), but has totally ignored the soft skills, which any Employer worth his salt will say is much more important. The popular saying is that ‘ you can always fine tune the technical skills of an employee, but if his/her attitude is bad, then nothing can be done’.

Every year we are churning out people who are technically adequate but attitudinally handicapped. This results in a mismatch between the requirements of the employer and the skills of the employee.The current system hence has failed in meeting its primary objective. The objective should be to provide the necessary soft and hard skills to the student so as to increase his employability.

What should constitute the core product in any educational system?

Relevant Course Content (both hard and soft skills related)
Teaching Methodology
Batch Strength
Quality of Teachers
Evaluation System
It is interesting to note that Listening(45%) and Speaking(30%) is used most in work place but taught the least in the Schools and Colleges, while Reading(16%) and Writing(9%) is used least in the work place, but taught the most. This anomaly has to be corrected.

There are no arguments even from the die-hard fans of the education system that the current syllabus (the core product) at all levels has lost its relevance. This is especially true of the higher education.

For example let us take the parameters – teaching methodology and the Evaluation system together. The most prevalent teaching methodology is the Lecturing mode. Researches have shown that only 20 % of the lecture is retained even by the most attentive of listeners. This is assuming that the lecture is of the highest quality. It is astounding that our teachers are not prepared to use technology. Is'nt it time that we switched over to Computers, Internet, Over Head Projectors,Multimedia Projectors and Interactive visual media tools. Why can’t we use them extensively in teaching? Whenever I mention this I hear howls of protests and excuses saying that Schools and Colleges don’t have the necessary funds. I don’t believe this. Schools and Colleges are always finding it easy to raise funds for building more classrooms, but how come they are unable to find resources for upgrading their teaching aids. Most of the schools and colleges take hefty sums as donations and fees. Even the smallest computer centre in your neighbourhood has these teaching aids. So the protest does not hold water. Teaching methodology has to undergo a sea change.

Our current methodology does not encourage the student to explore. The focus is on learning things from an examination viewpoint. The current evaluation system checks the memory of the student and not his analytical skills or the student’s ability to apply what he has learned. All a smart student has to do is to learn by heart and spit it out at the examination hall. I have always told my students that they have to be downright stupid to fail in an Indian University Examination. With the advent of Internet, the student should be allowed to explore.

I am not sure how many of our teachers or parents have understood the importance using the World Wide Web to turn your child into a wonderful person. It is the ultimate source for obtaining knowledge. The objective of the education should be to acquire long term knowledge that will stand the student in good stead through his life.

The student currently is focused only on individual goals represented by his marks and his rank. There is immense pressure on the student from his parents to perform well in an individual capacity and he is driven by the parents to believe that unless he gets a first rank, he is worthless. The student, over a period of time, starts viewing his classmates as adversaries rather than friends who would supplement his knowledge. This attitude is carried forward to his job, where he finds to his dismay that it just does not pay to have only individual goals. More often than not, being the only child, the student has to contend with parents who are very possessive and over bearing. This makes the student very dependant on his parents. How often have we seen a student doing well academically but found to be incapable of making even the smallest decision in life on his own. The parents have to take the blame for this. In their eagerness to make their Child's life smooth and hassle free, they are inadvertently turning the child into someone who gets everything easily in life and who is inept at handling any sort of problems.

An often looked aspect of our education is the batch strength which is currently in the region of 40-60. The Batch Strength should not be more than 15. It is proven through researches that the ideal student: teacher ratio is 15:1. This will ensure that the teacher will be in a position to pay individual attention to the each of his student.

The Final Parameter is the Quality of Teachers. Our system does not encourage the best talent to become the teachers. The Teaching profession has lost its sheen. A person takes up teaching as a last resort. Most of them take up the assignment for the wrong reasons. Many become teachers because they can’t get any other job, some because their husbands are working in the same area and they have nothing else to do, for some this is a time pass. Very few become teachers because they love teaching. I have interviewed so many people who have applied for the post of teachers and can count on my fingers the number of people who said that they want the job because they like teaching. The teaching job is not lucrative and in a vast majority of the cases, the teacher has to pay a hefty sum as Donation to get the job. The first priority of the teacher is to take back the money he/she has invested. The end result is the ultimate curse of today’s education system – Tuition. Parents too become an active party to this by forcing their wards to take tuition whether the student requires it or not. I had a Professor in Physics whom I admired a lot. He used to steadfastly refuse to take tuition. He says with lot of feeling “ If it is found that my student has to take a tuition to do well in his examination, I will resign that day. I take this as the ultimate insult and it is a reflection of the quality of my teaching” – Need I say more?

WIIFM – What Is In It For Me? Every customer asks this question and unless he is assured that there is some benefit for him, he will never buy a product. There is no WIIFM for the child and to go to the school. The child goes to the school because he has to, not because he sees a benefit. He does not enjoy going to school. This in the long run will spell doom for our Schools and Colleges.

The Educational Institutions are complacent. But they have to wake up. Otherwise they, in their present form, will cease to exist. Don’t tell me they wont. Who thought that our countryside would be full of private schools? They sprang up like mushrooms because the Government Schools refused to innovate. Our Schools and Colleges have already lost out on a big opportunity – the IT revolution. The phenomenal success of the IT Training Institutes should serve as a warning to the Formal Educational Institutions. Our higher education system is in a mess. We do not have a single university in the amongst the world's top 200 and the best young brains migrate to western countries that offer a chance for them to pursue a mentally stimulating higher order academic degrees. This needs to be seriously addressed.

The Formal Educational System has to innovate or perish, else posterity will not forgive us