I don’t hesitate to state the fact that our education system fails to build socially and emotionally sound individuals. At first, I was under the impression that movies like- Three Idiots and Taare Zameen Par had already marked the end of this perennial debate. Alas! I’m proved wrong and here I am encasing my strong views on this issue, in this blog.
The famous physicist, Albert Einstein, believed that rote memorization was redundant, back then he advocated for a system which was more emotionally, socially and intellectually developed and not the one that we still cling on to. Unsurprisingly, it's his brain that is still kept preserved in the Mutter museum in Philadelphia and not of the crammers who boast of being highly educated.
The Reality is that the Indian education system still carries the same colonial baggage, shouldered by us for decades now. It is an outdated structure, built to produce civil servants and bureaucrats who could do the routine job. Sadly, not much has changed in its objective and even today, the career graph of an individual is drafted on the basis of the report card marks.
My simple question is, after graduating from school or college, are you and I going to be socially and emotionally sound enough to bear with the pragmatic problems in life? No, because evidently, Empathy, building successful relationships and sustaining them, basic skills like cooking that all genders should know, communicating one’s thoughts, application of learning, importance of mental health, NONE of it is taught. Our mechanical world is driven by statistically programmed robots of flesh, such that even parents want to produce child prodigies keeping childhood at stake. As a result, one in seven Indians between 15-24 years of age feels depressed and a minority actually reach out for help.
Some thinkers might argue that the current system has had a revolution with the new education policy. Yes, the New education policy has tried to create a spark but principle without the core holistic practice is of no use. The core system still encourages children to absorb information, memorize, and replay. The curriculum simply allows schools to kill creativity. Whether the New education policy can revolutionize our education system for the better, is an extended research driven topic for my future blog for sure!
But as of now, I don’t find our current education system being able to justify the incompetence, unemployment, social, economic, and emotional imbalance caused among the youth, because of the system.
