What Needs To Change In Our Education System

Pehchaan School - Delhi

 

Focus on skill based education.

Our education system is geared towards teaching and testing knowledge at every level as opposed to teaching skills.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him one day, teach him how to catch fishes and you feed him for a lifetime.”

I believe that if you teach man a skill, you enable him for a lifetime. Knowledge is largely forgotten after the semester exam is over. Still, year after year Indian students focus on cramming information.

The best crammers are rewarded by the system. This is one of the fundamental flaws of our education system. Reward creativity, original thinking, research and innovation.

 

Pehchaan School - Delhi

 

Our education system rarely rewards what deserves highest academic accolades. Deviance is discouraged. Risk taking is mocked. Our testing and marking systems need to be built to recognize original contributions, in form of creativity, problem solving, valuable original research and innovation.

If we could do this successfully Indian education system would have changed overnight. Memorising is no learning; the biggest flaw in our education system is perhaps that it incentivizes memorizing above originality.

Get smarter people to teach. For way too long teaching became the sanctuary of the incompetent. Teaching jobs, are until today widely regarded as safe, well-paying, risk-free and low-pressure jobs. Once a teacher told me in high school “Well, if you guys don’t study it is entirely your loss – I will get my salary at the end of the month anyway.” He could not put across the lack of incentive for being good at teaching any better.

Thousands of terrible teachers all over India are wasting valuable time of young children every day all over India. It is high time to encourage a breed of superstar teachers. The internet has created this possibility – the performance of a teacher now need not be restricted to a small classroom.

Now the performance of a teacher can be opened up for the world to see. The better teacher will be more popular, and acquire more students. That’s the way of the future.

Read here about why I think that we are closing on to the age of rockstar teachers. We need leaders, entrepreneurs in teaching positions, not salaried people trying to hold on to their mantle.

By: Monika

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