NEET and Tamil Nadu
The educational environment in India can be compared to deserts and orchards lying next to each other. According to the National Family Health Survey, in states like Bihar, Jharkand, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, 1/4th of the woman populace between the ages of 15–24 are illiterate. (Source: National Family Health Survey) Whereas, in states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala, it is the opposite. at twice the national average and about ten percentage points more than the global average. In other words, at least half the population will have had a college education in Tamil Nadu, if this trend continues for a few more years.
With the introduction of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, the rosy picture painted above unravels itself into a pit of snakes.
As a state, Tamil Nadu has always consistently done well in academics and producing doctors. It boasts of probably the best health care system in the country with medical tourism flourishing. Through all these vanity metrics, a very important detail has been left out. The quality of academics!!
With the imposition of the NEET across the country, Tamil Nadu finds itself in an extremely precarious situation. Standardized entrance exams like the JEE and the NEET have long been shunned away by the students who study under the state board system and they particularly focus on one thing, the 12th standard board examination. Later, the focus is tuned to two things. An admission in Anna University or into one of the medical colleges in the state, both of which completely disregard a standardized entrance exam procedure and focus only on board examination performance.
The focus is so concentrated that many schools decide to partly/completely skip teaching the 11th standard syllabus. The Tamil Nadu state board system is one that focuses heavily on rote than understanding and applying.
Thus naturally, when an application oriented exam like the JEE/NEET comes in, the students are in no way prepared to handle it. For the longest time, the Tamil Nadu government continuously kept opposing the imposition of the NEET in the state and there were various representations and protests, even one where the Tamil Nadu legislature passed a bill and sent it to the president for his assent. In a matter of days, a Supreme court ruling in favour of NEET brought all of this swiftly down.
Now, one might argue that India is a federalist country and individual states must be their own laboratories for policy. But this debate goes above and beyond all that. This is a debate that has no business to be politicized and excessive politicizing is what is happening, with each political party blaming the other for these failures. The main stakeholder in this debate is not the government but the student and their parents. The previous admission season has been beset by confusion, anger and all-round despair. The reaction to this entire episode also has large touches of communalism to it. As soon as the NEET was imposed on the state, the immediate reaction was to reserve an obscene 85% of all medical seats for Tamil Nadu State board students and various protests about how this is eroding Tamil culture (How people got to that is beyond us)
This article doesn’t by any means seek to discredit the hard work and the intelligence of the students under the state board system. But it seeks to point out the flaws in a system under which more than 80% of the student population in Tamil Nadu study under.
Education cannot be run like an industry where with an input of text, an output of high marks is achieved. Education is an agricultural process where the quality of the crop produced matters way more than the amount of crops produced. The time has come where the state education department needs to seriously introspect and spearhead huge reforms in order to get students for graduate education. If immediate changes in educational policy aren’t brought forth, we are looking at marginalizing a majority of the student populace and also at quashed ambitions and dreams. The students are in no way at fault here.
A doctor treats his/her patients either symptomatically or diagnostically. Symptomatic treatment for the ills of education just doesn’t work. A long term, comprehensive policy which focuses on building thinking, analyzing and rationalizing capabilities of the student allowing them to question everything without taking anything for granted is the only way forward.
If not, we are building our future for a generation which is poorly educated and that will soon manifest itself to be the biggest problem this country has
The writer is the CEO and co-founder of Warhorse while also being a keen public policy analyst.
