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

What ails mainstream education 

and 

some remedies

- Archie D'Souza

I was attracted by to a report in the Times of India on July 17, 2018. The headline reads “Government to take action against integrated coaching classes” The first two lines of the report read “State higher education minister Vinod Tawde on Monday described the private integrated coaching classes as the rot that has set in our highly commercialized education system and promised strict action to curb them.” Go to the following link to read the rest:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/65015712.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

In India, private coaching is a USD 10 b plus business.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 is termed as shadow education is a multi-billion dollar business, which owes its existence to the under-performance of our school and higher education system, one can imagine how deep and grave the malise is. There is, however, 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 started in 2010 one such institution, Sunrise Academy of Management Studies (SAMS), in Kochi, Kerala. SAMS was set up, not by 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 was a quest to do just that in areas like Transportation, Logistics, Supply Chain Management, Hotel Management, Property Management and other areas. To a great extent, SAMS achieved the goals it set out to do but age and health issues forced my two partners to give up. I haven't given up though and continue in my quest.

After the closure of SAMS, I continued being associated with smaller institutes across Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which offer short-term courses of various types which don't coach students for exams but skill them up according to industry requirements. Among the industries I train them for are Logistics, Aviation and Hospitality.

According to Indian rating agency ICRA, the logistics sector is expected to achieve a CAGR of 7-8% over the next decade. It is expected to touch USD 215 b in the next two years according to the Economic Surver 2017-18. A great deal of investments in private, public and joint sectors, are being made in logistics infrastructure. Since I've spent a great deal of time in this sector, I know exactly the skill-sets needed by recruiters. When corporate professionals are involved in engineering and management education they contribute to ensuring that skilled, knowledgeable and qualified professionals. Several institutes offer unique certificate and diploma programmes in these subjects.

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. While, according to latest reports, the standard of employablity of graduates has been steadily improving over the decade, it is still very pathetic and has a long way to go. The end-result is a huge population of qualified but unemployable graduates.

I am not for a moment suggesting that every subject listed in school and university syllabi is 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 5 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. The half-hearted measures taken by the current and last governments isn't enough
• Great emphasis should be laid on sports and extra-curricular activities
• MBA programmes should concentrate on people skills rather than lectures
• Classroom sessions should be almost entirely based on case study analysis
• 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, with certain exceptions, 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. Some institutions do have faculty development programmes

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

https://www.businesstoday.in/top-story/what-went-wrong-with-indian-higher-education/story/328786.html