Why India’s broken education system will never get fixed

If we want to close the gap between our expectations and reality, it is first of all important to have a healthy dose of self-awareness. Without self-awareness, we do not realize the existence of the gap. If we do not know of its existence, we will not take action to close it.

To anyone who interacts with the average product of the Indian education factory, it is obvious that the system is broken. The average product of our schools and colleges lacks discipline, curiosity, and a good work ethic. The education system cannot take credit for the exceptional individuals as their success is despite the system and not because of it. We have civil engineers joining IT services organizations, computer engineers who cannot code and English language teachers who are weak in English.

We do not have an unemployment or underemployment problem in India. What we have is a problem of poor human capital. Over the last few years, there has been a lot of talk of “skilling” the youth. The sad reality is that the unskilled youth does not see themselves as lacking employable skills.

What we have right now in the country is a situation where all the stakeholders are happily locked in a system that is massively suboptimal.

The parents are happy sending their kids to “International Schools”. They go by the physical infrastructure like airconditioners and imposing buildings. Very few check out the quality of teachers employed by the school. The schools get away by employing those who couldn’t find employment elsewhere. The teachers are poorly trained, lack motivation and frankly the job of teaching is beyond most of them. What can our children learn from such teachers? As a vendor to several educational institutions, I have observed that the biggest bottleneck to introducing anything intelligent in the curriculum are the teachers themselves. The average teacher in an average Indian school/college is not interested in professional self-development.

Most schools and colleges are run as businesses in India and the fact that many of them are still in “business” simply means that they are giving what the market wants (what the parents want). The curriculum is outdated and massively dumbed down, so much so that it is not unusual to see a student scoring a centum in Mathematics in class XII and subsequently failing in engineering mathematics. The school and university boards do not see this as a problem that they need to fix. The schools are happy churning out 100% results. The colleges are happy talking about their 100% placement — placing students from the core sector at IT services companies. Everyone is happy patting their back and the feel good factor is infectious.

Recently, one of the school text books became infamous for having a chapter on Rahul Gandhi. There are four questions on the life of Rahul Gandhi (WTF?). The student gets all four answers right. He is happy. The ultra-competitive parents are even happier and boast to their neighbors. The school is happy that the student has done well in the quiz. At the end of the day, what exactly did the student learn by scoring 100% on questions related to the life of Rahul Gandhi?

I see the same thing happening in ICT education in schools. Our students are busy learning MS Word, Excel, and Power Point, when they should be learning to program. Sadly, everyone is happy.

The reality is that the parents, students, education boards and universities and the schools/colleges do not believe that what they do is broken. Ergo, none of these problems will be fixed.