What ails mainstream education and some remedies - Archie D'Souza

I was attracted to a headline on July 6, 2012 which read “Class Act: In India Private Coaching is a $ 6.5 b Business” on the first page of the Business Line.  This, I thought, is a symptom of a great malaise our nation, not just the education system, faces.  Is this, though, some malignant incurable disease?  If what this report calls shadow education is a $ 6.5 b business, which owes its existence to the under-performance of our school and higher education system, there is also a parallel education system for which numbers are not available; a system which is doing a great deal of good for job-seekers and the economy as a whole.

The main problem with mainstream education is that the system is geared and oriented with one goal in mind – securing a maximum amount of marks, neglecting altogether acquiring of knowledge & skills, developing an analytic mind (thinking, by the way, is discouraged in most schools and colleges in the country) and inculcating the right values.  This is where the parallel education system comes in – a system that should have been a part of the mainstream but, because of its absence there, has been filled by lacs, maybe crores, of institutions/academies offering skills and knowledge needed by industry.

I happen to be part of such an institution, Sunrise Academy of Management Studies (SAMS), situated in Kochi, Kerala.  SAMS has been set up, not be academicians or politicians, but by people from the corporate sector.  Several studies conducted by central & state government bodies as well as others mention the skills gaps that need to be filled to make young people, including graduates & post-graduates, employable.  SAMS is a quest to do just that in areas like Transportation, Logistics, Supply Chain Management, Hotel Management, Property Management and other areas.

An article by Vinod Agarwal on the editorial page of the July 7 issue of the same publication deals with the supply chain challenge and how to meet it  http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/article3610114.ece .It mentions the great deal of investments being made in logistics infrastructure.  The founders of SAMS, who have come from this and related industries, know exactly the skill-sets needed in the logistics sector.  SAMS hopes to contribute skilled, knowledgeable and qualified professionals through a unique set of certificate and diploma programmes.

It was Gandhiji who said that education should be of the heart, head and hand.  Unfortunately, our mainstream education does not follow this great message of the Father of the Nation.  All it does is orient students towards examinations right from kindergarten to post-graduation.  The ability to cram useless subjects and reproduce them in an examination is the basis of student assessment.  Languages are part of the syllabus but several students don’t learn to speak or write, several B.Com graduates can’t do simple calculations and MBAs lack communication skills.   These two links give interesting perspectives on the subject

 http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/only-57-indian-engineers-can-write-grammatically-correct-sentences-in-english/179941/on 

http://www.sify.com/finance/Why-are-so-many-of-our-engineering-grads-unemployable-imagegallery-others-mijpeMcaabf.html#.UDGxyZQLIOk.facebook

The end-result is a huge population of qualified unemployable youngsters.

I am not for a moment suggesting that every subject listed in school and university syllabi are useless.  Many are indeed useful.  However, thanks to faulty delivery methods, students end up learning nothing.  Several educational institutions are set up by people who lack the values needed and this fact is reflected in the manner in which these institutions are run.  Teachers lack the training needed to discover talent and inculcate it.  This is mainly because those who take up teaching do so because they weren’t able to get jobs elsewhere.

Let me list out two examples from personal experience.

• I was addressing a group of MBAs who were embarking on a career in Logistics.  In a hall filled with about 200 people, I couldn’t find 50 who could read a map or locate a place on Earth.  Less than 20 knew more than 5% of the capitals of countries on a list given.  I didn’t even try to test them on world’s currencies.  The concept of time-zones was alien to them.  These are MBAs embarking on a career in logistics.
• Less than 5% of the graduates I come across know the basics of the subjects they’ve graduated in and less than 1% can communicate in English and this includes those who’ve come from ICSE and CBSE schools.

Universities across the country churn out lacs of Engineering and Management graduates.  Are these graduates fit for employment?  In my corporate career I must have interviewed hundreds of these graduates and found most of them with no employable skills what-so-ever.  These frustrated individuals take up jobs which are in no way related to their qualifications.

So, what is the remedy for this?

•         Raise the pay-scales of teachers so that the best talent is attracted to the profession
•         Raise the level of teacher training and ensure that training is a continuous process throughout the teachers’ careers
•          Encourage people from the corporate sector to take up teaching, especially after retirement.  The corporate experience should make up for lack of qualifications.  Bring in the Gandhian principles of education of the hand, heart and head
•          The vocational education sector should be accorded due recognition
•          Great emphasis should be laid on sports and extra-curricular activities
•          MBA programmes should concentrate on people skills rather than lectures
•          Close interaction between education and agriculture/industry will ensure that society benefits from jointly developed degree syllabi
•          The methodology of teaching must change.  The emphasis should be on knowledge and skills not performance in examinations
•          Instructors in institutions of higher education should have a minimum 3 years corporate experience.  For management and engineering this should be 5 years
•          25% of the time a student spend should be on industrial training
•          Have a system of refresher courses for teachers to ensure that their skill and knowledge levels are always at the highest level

If the instructions in schools is of the right quality and teachers are paid well. The shadow education system will die a natural death.

Today September 10, I have added two more interesting links:

Top Degrees Picked By HR Experts While Recruiting

By SiliconIndia  |   Wednesday, 22 August 2012, 17:54 IST   |   

http://jobs.siliconindia.com/career-news/Top-Degrees-Picked-By-HR-Experts-While-Recruiting-nid-127079.html

Top 5 College Majors With Highest Unemployment Rates

By SiliconIndia  |   Wednesday, 29 August 2012, 15:42 IST   |    5 Comments

http://jobs.siliconindia.com/career-news/Top-5-College-Majors-With-Highest-Unemployment-Rates-nid-127726.html