Antiquated System of Education
By: Chaitanya Dhakne
Tags: Education Reform, System, Improvement, Life, Education

Thanks to Google Images

Oh Yes, I know it’s versatile, sensitive, boring and anything more? Please add it. Now how I ended up writing on this topic is announcements of board results and interesting discussion with my friend. Obviously results call for inevitable celebrations of toppers and de-motivation for those who couldn’t be there or in short, who aren’t happy with it.

But the real question is the ones who are above 22–23 years age, do they feel these result announcements & celebrations worth or useful for their future? I personally do not. But also I agree that when I was at that st(age), it was a big thing for me to get good score in order to celebrate it and shoot up the expectations about me from the society that I could be the one with the bright future. Now here is another mysterious question that what does this ‘bright future’ mean? I can bet that no one will be even able to define the boundaries of bright future. Because at the end of the day, we are humans, we are selfish, we are greedy, anything more is less for us. & why we became like this? Because we have been brought up in that way. We have been taught that there is always something better than what we could do, there is something more perfect than what we did. I myself can’t believe that I have written that ‘There is no limit to perfection, each tomorrow can be made more perfect than today’ in my resume/SOP, but obviously academic/research language. And in this process of being more perfect than what we did, we might be missing on some one-time moments in life. But sadly we realize such things either too late or never ever realize itself.

Now don’t try to misunderstand that I am enlightening you with life’s real goals and all. After all I am neither a Sadhu nor a Mahatma. Through this scribbled piece of mine, I just want to analyze that whatever we learnt till now from school, are we using it in our jobs or earning money in whatever way we are? I think not, at least me. And if not, then why are we spending our childhood in learning things which we won’t be using to live life. In place of such things, can’t we teach children things which will be definitely useful for them in future. Yes please wait, coming on to such things!

Starting with language subjects we learn in school are absolutely necessary for developing personality and understanding the culture. But the way they were being taught aren’t making them too the point for the kids. Here people are nailing down these subjects by memorizing guides and answers. And culture and personality are far away things for them.

What we observe till now is the jobs people are doing after their college, requires the part of the things which we learnt in the college. But you can say that the things we learn in the college are advance version of things which we learnt in the school. But is it really required to learn all the things from school which may not be useful in the future career of the person? Now don’t tell that the more the knowledge the better it is! Because if everyone would have followed this, world would have been completely different today than what it is now. Why some guy is learning history by heart when he knows his dream is completely irrelevant than this subject? Now conventional ones will say that s/he should know about their ancestors, culture and struggles but to tell same things to him/her, there are many ways rather than subject in the school, through which he hardly gets feel of it.

Rather than just teaching all subjects to students, they should be given clear idea about what careers lie in front of them in future and what is required to excel in them. Then let them choose whichever is their dream or choice. Now some might say that choosing your lifetime career at such small age may not be fair but believe me, the thoughts or dreams we have at small age are our original dreams without anyone’s influence. With the time, we start listen to people around us and start to overthink about things which they say and due to which our choices/dreams might go off course. So what in short to be said is that making career choices at young age and proceeding towards it will be better thing to do in this age. And this will give person more time at small age to develop through other things like dancing, music and any other hobby.

Now don’t try to label me as career counselor or something, but what I want to say is there are too many things in life to experience or to be done and not all are meant to be done after schooling or college. Also some things are definitely difficult to get done with the time which you can easily grasp at younger age.

I will go one step further to say that actually we spend so much time to know/learn about things once career gets settled, which we never tried to learn before. Just to start, financial literacy, this topic is too important once you come into corporate world, but no one will tell you the spelling of it until you realize when you run into it accidentally. And also it is not as boring as history also but still it is never been touched in schools!

These days too many people are suffering through the thing so called depression. And the root cause is being not able to express themselves or their difficulties in front of the society just because they will be labeled as losers. But instead of teaching that all people are losers and winners at one or other time, we are busy in teaching how battles are won in the history, how to score more marks in language subjects and much more prejudicial things. If students are taught about the things which they will be facing in future rather than telling what happened in the past, they will be more prepared to fight with it, then let it be depression or Corona!

Before some days, one of my friend asked me, “why they never taught us about banking procedures and other such things?”, in that moment I realized what I am doing now, is hardly 10% relevant to what I have learnt till now in 23 years. And still there are many more important things which I am yet to see and learn. Then why I left to learn those things before? Just because they were not embedded in our educational system. Our educational system doesn’t recognize it as necessary part of our lives.

With this time, we have entered into this digital world completely and so educational system also needs to reform itself to help people adopt into this new world. It needs to be upgraded with career choice at young age, proceeding towards it, financial literacy & basic literacy required in life about common things, which is not seen in childhood but to be faced in future. This will not only lead India towards better HDI but better GDP too along with progress of each individual citizen.

While signing off, I will leave this incredible line from Robin Sharma,