What should be the ultimate goal of education @ India

Despite being the youngest nations in the world with more than 62% of our population in the working age group (15-59 years), we are unable to reap this demographic dividend to its fullest. This is because we have a severe shortage of well-trained skilled workers. However, the bigger challenge is the paucity of non-employability of large sections of the conventionally educated youth, who possess little or no job skills. Though, the recent efforts of our Hon’ble Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi has provided a fresh impetus to the Skill India agenda by creating an appropriate ecosystem that will rapidly scale up skill development efforts in India.

However, it will continue to fall short its expectation till the time we revamp our education policy. Today, we have thousands of institutions/colleges churning out millions of students every year; who have studied for years yet lack basic functional and life skills. We have engineers who can not even replace the electric fuse at their home, and management students who can’t differentiate between Marketing and Selling. This is because, even today we are blindly following the educational policy which was drafted in 1835 by Lord Macaulay; which emphasizes on Rote learning.

I am not questioning the overall appropriateness of our current education system or suggesting revamping of entire education policy. What I am suggesting is that we need to transform our education policy from making students educated to become educated and employable. This will only happen when we zero down the purpose of education for the different set of our population. For example, what is the purpose of educating rural masses? The basic need of rural masses across the country is ability to read, write in local language and be able to calculate financial transactions, so as middle men and micro financers should not take advantage of their illiteracy and manipulate them. However, we keep teaching rural students a syllabus which they are unable to relate and therefore it does not enthuse or motivate them to study. Needless to mention that the huge amount of money for creating infrastructure goes underutilized. Nevertheless, to teach these basics instead of creating big paraphernalia we need to work on developing few motivated individuals from each village as teachers. Who will not only bring back our tradition of having ‘Gurukul’ live but will also reduce expenses drastically. These individuals should be provided guidance and remuneration, which will be much more economical than creating infrastructure.

I am in no way saying that the rural masses do not require higher studies or are not capable of competing with urban populations. We should not forget that deserving students always find their way to top. Mr. Abdul Kalam and Mr. Narendra Modi are the perfect example. Therefore, the interested students who complete this basic curriculum and want to pursue study need to be provided facilities for further study. We need to research and create specific courses which will help rural students utilise the knowledge learned. For example, courses around farming, newer techniques of irrigation, water harvesting, usages of appropriate fertilisers and storing of food grains etc. In addition, courses on other vocational and life skills should be made available to broaden student’s horizon and provide them with employment opportunities in their villages itself. 

                                                                                                  To be continued…