Failed Education System: Promoting Exclusiveness Through Competition 

A child isn’t yet born that his career gets decided by his parents. Which school he/she will attend and what will he/she will become in life. And if child’s father or mother couldn’t fulfill their respective dreams, the child may have to shoulder the responsibility of fulfilling the parental desire irrespective of his/her own talent and capabilities. 

Then this child is introduced to school system at the earliest with a motive of getting him/her mature as early as possible in terms of knowledge. Child is loaded with a heavy bag on his/her tiny shoulder and dumped at the school where he/she is taught to memorize text books. The more the memorizing capability the more child will get grades, that determine the success. Child’s mind is considered as a bucket to be filled by bookish knowledge. Child is told to digest things without knowing the background because it is often out of limits, thus the real power of mind which is thinking and imagination is totally put to a halt. 

Interpretation of knowledge has no scope in this kind of education. It fails to create excitement about learning new things. It has been pre-occupied with filling buckets instead of lightening the fire of creativity. A child is born with a free mind but we imprison him by feeding bookish knowledge. It is feeding a human being with a set of particular commands around which his or her whole world revolves. Thus our education system manufactures robots. Instead of recognizing and valuing that every person is unique, our education system believes in mass-production, people of same kind of taste and opinion which creates a sort of academic inflation. 

A lot of brilliant and talented people are never able to earn a living from their very natural talent because what they are good at is never valued by our education system. We get these people to obey the rules of the game leaving them feeling miserable. I can’t dance, no one bats an eye but if I am not able to calculate the value of X, everybody loses their mind. In simple words, our education system tries to fit a square person in a round hole which creates more misery than benefits. Moreover, it is taking a toll on our human resource. Most of the students get depressed during this process and instead of embracing education, most adopt a mindset to just survive.

 Today we actually see education through the prism of business. The money spent to get education is considered as venture capital. It is similar to that of investing money in a company. You send your child to the best school taking your financial condition in consideration with a hope that after several years he will get a good job that will turn him into a money minting machine. This “business point of view” has led to competition in education, undermining its “human manufacturing” and “change infusing” capacity. 

Our education system tends to increases the earning potential of an individual but the society doesn’t seem to be getting any benefit since it promotes exclusiveness through competition. Education should not be a competition in which children are pitted against one another, with each part desperately trying to make sure that odds are in his or her child’s favour. It should be about knowledge and enrichment, about unleashing an individual’s true potential. It should be about making the world a better place in which every educated person has something to offer both the present and the future.

The present competition has reduced education to that of a memory game where students are made to recall specific lectures given to them. It has a copy/paste approach to assess the value of students. Copy from a book to your temporary memory and then paste it on the answer script, which is enough to find your worth. No creativity is required in this process. This kind of education doesn’t make us ready to cope up with the challenges of life. It just prepares us to tackle a particular competitive exam with complete focus on copy-paste process. It doesn’t make us ready to be responsible members of a society. There is no doubt that it tends to increases the earning potential of an individual but the society doesn’t seem to be getting any benefit since it promotes exclusiveness through competition. Education should not be a competition in which children are pitted against one another, with each part desperately trying to make sure that odds are in his or her child’s favour. It should be about knowledge and enrichment, about unleashing an individual’s true potential. It should be about making the world a better place in which every educated person has something to offer both the present and the future. Knowledge is no more power. Power is the piece of paper that defines you as the sort of right person. This piece of paper can be had from the educated system but not necessarily from the actual learning process. It is not that we all approve this competition. Dissatisfaction with the present competing system in education is ubiquitous. Our trouble lies in the question that in this desperately unfair world, who would want to be the first to withdraw from competing?

Our education system has the power to make us simultaneously ready for peon, sweeper, teacher, policeman, and banker, each and every post that gets advertised in the newspaper and employment news with minimum requirements of our qualification. Having a clear goal in life that we are passionate about is all that is needed for a happy life but it fails to lead us to our passion. 

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is an IITian. After graduating from an IIT he became an IRS officer but finally landed into politics. Athar Amir Ul Shafi, IAS 2016 second topper, first cracked JKCET and joined Government Medical College but later got selected for BE in an IIT and after completing graduation became an IAS officer. This is what our education does. It first compels to take the secured path where you know you will get any kind of job. But as you grow up, you realize that the life you lead till now was never meant for you. Most of the people continue to live the same life but few like Kejriwal go a step ahead and switch between careers. Before these two found, and they must have, their dream career, they wasted a lot of tax payers’ money. Not only that, but they also became deficiency for our society. If the two were educated in a way that they could have realized their potential early and the “security reason” that our education creates would not have become a reason, we would have got two able highly passionate engineers, a good dedicated doctor,  a passionate IRS officer at their abandoned positions and the two at their respective positions.

Our education system needs an overhaul. Competition needs to be eliminated from the education. It will itself stop bucket filling process that will lead to creativity by encouraging thinking and imagination. A sophisticated system needs to be brought in where each and every unique talent is recognized at the earliest. Counseling needs to be introduced to identify every individual’s natural talent and assign them the same trade or profession. This will let each of us find tranquility and happiness in our work and there is no doubt that being naturally equipped each one of us will be a mini-Einstein of his or her profession. There is no doubt that we can’t build a utopia but there is always a room for perfection.

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