Changing Education System

The past generation lived their lives by the following guidelines: to land a white-collar job, one must go to school, then to a college and then to a university. One assumed that this simple pattern would ensure a prestigious, well-paying job. But does this assumption still hold? Not anymore.

The faults in current education system

The batch system was introduced after the Industrial Revolution and it was modeled on the interests of Industrialization and in the image of it.  If one observes, our education system is quite similar to the factory system: we are divided into different departments and batches; the ring bells, factory people start working in batches, products are produced in batches and so on. Before the Industrial Revolution, education was imparted to preserve the values and culture, whereas now the concept of education is totally different.

 The issue with the batch system is that batches are made according to age. For example, a four year old child would be in 1st grade, five year old would be in 2nd and so on. We never pay attention to the capability of a child, in a particular subject and age. In school, different children are good in different subjects.  In the batch systems it is necessary for every five year old to be good in every subject taught in that class in order to get promoted to the next grade. Why can’t a 5th grade student who is excellent at Math but poor at English be allowed to take advanced Math courses and beginner’s English? Why aren’t students divided into classes according to capability rather than age? The current education system judges individual students through timed exams. This method judges the capability of a student to remember certain things for a certain time period in a pressured environment; it does not judge the intellectual capacity of the child or how much he has learnt. No wonder students forget everything they’ve memorized once the exam has been cleared. According to Sir Ken Robinson if you get help from your friend in school it is called cheating but if in the professional world you get help it is called collaboration.

Our education system judges the skills of an individual via countless number of exams. Children are under the pressure of exams to the extent that you hardly find them in other social activities like sports, community services, mingling with family members, etc. Just calculate the number of exams you’ve given to get the job that you have right now and then think about how much you remember of what you studied for those exams?  There are many students who are not good at written examinations but they perform better at practical tests so judging them with a written exam would not be fair. For example, many students do not qualify aptitude tests of universities not because they’re not smart or have good analytical skills but maybe because they don’t perform well under pressure.

Education changes your life-style

According to Sir Ken Robinson, there are two kinds of people in this world, ones who love doing their job and the others who do not.  Those who love their job can’t imagine doing anything else in this world because that is who they are, it’s their passion. Those who do not love their job keep looking at their clocks, want their day to finish and can’t wait for weekends to begin.  Like my friend, who loves painting and gets lost in it for hours and those hours look like minutes to him. That is because painting is his passion and he loves doing it.

 Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah once said that a person should do what he has capability of doing and that will benefit him and his country more than he does anything else. An interesting dialogue from a contemporary Indian film Three Idiots states something similar, that one should work  and study in a field where his interest lies rather than doing something to achieve success; if he does what he likes and enjoys doing, then he’ll be good at it and success will automatically follow. It is necessary for an individual to realize what he really wants to do, but I think we are obsessed with the concept of graduations.  We do MBAs, Engineering because of the trends in the job market, not because it is our passion. I am not against graduations, but an individual should take time to realize his gifted abilities and talent. Like Mr. Robinson says “Human communities depend upon diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability and at hard of our challenges is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of challenges”.

Our standard education system does not let us realize and think about our passion. We are badly engaged with dozens of exams since first grade that all we are concerned about scoring better in exams. Education is not helping an individual polish his skills or enhance his creativity, in fact it does the opposite. Huge pressures of exams keep a student away from social activities like sports and mingling up with people in social environment where a student learns the most about today’s world and realize his interest. Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi, a famous tennis player from Pakistan, has achieved such high profile because his passion lied with tennis and he realized that at the right time.  I don’t mean that everyone should stop studying and start playing tennis but this standard education system needs to be changed according to the needs of the existing world: a digitalized world where we talk about creativity and diverse ideas rather than standardized processes. Our education system should not be standardized but customized according to the needs of the students which will help individuals progressmore.

 Our education system also needs evolution rather than revolution.  We live in a time and age, where we cannot rely on standardized concepts of life but diverse and new ideas and that will happen when we have the freedom to express our creativity and that is judged in the right direction and manner by our teachers and experts. The meaning of education has changed in our world; we obtain education more as a pressure building exercise than to acquire knowledge and enjoy the process. This system cannot be changed by an individual; the change must come at a global level.