If there is one area I am disappointed with Modi Government, it is the scant disregard shown towards Education in general, and School Education in particular.
We first had Smriti Irani, and then Prakash Javedkar as Minister of Education. Both are not suitable for the job at hand.
We really need a visionary, with sufficient heft, and a disrupter par excellence.
Modi took the role of the disruptor with his bold demonetization move, followed by crackdown on Black Money. We need him to take over Education, and oversee it himself, if he really wish to make a new India.
Indian School Education system requires to be broken, shred to pieces and rebuilt. If it creates confusion amongst students and parents for an Academic Year or two, so be it. Anything, just about anything, is better than the farce that is going on in our Schools.
Everyone has lost sight of the objective of Education. It has to be to "create our youngsters to be bold, innovative, creative, responsible, knowledgeable, capable citizens who can contribute to the nation".
Instead what we have today is a system that takes care of the interests of the Government, School Management, and Parents. It has degraded to the level of testing only the memory of the student, and preparing him for a future where he is incapable of questioning anything.
We accuse the British of creating our Education system which was designed to produce Clerks who are capable of working under the British.
The biggest crime Nehru did was not to break the Education system when India attained independence. Instead, we continued with the trash, and worse. At least during British era, the teachers were good and passionate (My father used to revere his teachers, while I can count barely one or two teachers who were good, and my next generation cant even think of one who is good) but today, Teaching has become the last refuge of the worst qualified.
Everyone site the reason that School Education has become a business. I have no qualms with that, except the acceptance of Capitation Fee and taking donations from Teacher job aspirants - both a strict no in my dictionary. Schools have to run on profit for them to grow, for creating facilities and for paying the teachers well.
We need a curriculum which is not generic till Standard X. We need a system where we can identify interests at a young age, and give children the option of acquiring knowledge in their areas of interests, instead of exposing them to everything under the sun.
Learning by rot, and testing the child every other week has to go. Children hate school. And why not? What is there in an school to interest them? Teachers come and talk rot for hours in monotonous tones. They never encourage questions. And they use the stick of discipline for everything. We need our children to be free birds, aware of their boundaries but allowed the freedom to explore their areas of interests. Each child has some special skills. We need to encourage them to identify their competencies and excel.
Just imagine what would have happened if Dronacharya used the same syllabus for all the Pandavas? Instead he taught Yudhishtiran the art of fighting in a Chariot, Bheeman the skills of using a Mace, Arjunan Archery, Nakulan and Sahadevan the mystery of getting the best out of Horses and Cows, respectively. And combined they were a Powerful unit.
We need such a system.
India is blessed with a rich Guru Shishya Parambara. We just HAVE to go back to it at the earliest.
And we need Modi to act now, as now itself is too late by a few decades!
