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Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups. The fault is the Indian education system, whic

Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups. The fault is the Indian education system, which silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards. Its really sad and alarming here. (I am from India). There are whole generations of students, who, from their early schooling, right up to a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, are taught to memorize and spit out answers. There are very few schools that actually teach creativity, problem solving skills, etc. A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day. Unless there is a revolution in the education system in India, it would be very difficult to have a large pool of talented problem solvers and creative thinkers. Those Indians who are famous or are talented, are that way because they fought against the system or ignored it completely or have had good mentors.

sho 8y ago
> silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards You can absolutely say that about the Chinese education system as well, and they seem to be doing OK. I agree it's a shame that creativity is undervalued, if not outright suppressed, by the education system, but at the same time I don't think entrepreneurial spirit arises from formal education in the first place.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  Entrepreneurial spirit generally doesn't emerge from standard formal education, but not much is done to suppress it, and there are often extracurriculars to encourage young entrepreneurs. Rote memorization also only gets you so far, often you get tested on how you arrived at an answer, not just on the answer itself. Understanding the process is just as important as knowing it. Perhaps this is a bit like the schooling of Bolshevik Engineers versus American Engineers, the former had a much reduced curriculum that helped the USSR catch up in engineering talent on paper, meanwhile those engineers were missing key concepts that you need to understand to build planes, bridges and similar that won't spontaneously degrade.
  - mantas 8y ago
    Fun part is, high school is/was the other way. USSR curriculum was full of stuff that 99% of students wouldn't ever use. There was little incentive to use anything in practice. You had to memorise, pass test and then you can forget it. This practice continues to this day in big parts of ex-Soviet sphere. I had plenty of teachers who took pride in saying that "stupid Americans learn this only in university!". Yet Americans I meet remember what they learned and know who to put it to use. Meanwhile I don't remember jack shit :D
    - kamaal 8y ago
      You highlighted a very important. Getting degrees for sake of getting degrees. This is a big thing in India too. People become engineers and then decide what they want to do.
    - paganel 8y ago
      > I had plenty of teachers who took pride in saying that "stupid Americans learn this only in university!" Can absolutely confirm this saying for Romania of the late '80s and throughout all of the '90s (so, even after the Wall had fallen).
      - mantas 8y ago
        It's still the same logic even today. Worst thing, updates programmes double down on pushing even more facts. While PISA scores are getting worse and worse. I guess it will take few generations to forget about glorious soviet schooling :(
    - kumarvvr 8y ago
      My teachers and peers and even parents used to say this and I would always be mighty proud of it.
    - collyw 8y ago
      We got Shakespeare.
- kumarvvr 8y ago
  I don't know much about China's IT sector, but at-least in their manufacturing sector, they have built up a sizable manufacturing base, not by being innovative, but by being sweatshops for western countries, and, ahem, borrowing their IP. Most Chinese companies that are on the radar now, like Xiaomi, have taken this path. They have learnt from western counterparts and built upon it.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    As somebody whose career was linked to well being of the Chinese manufacturing sector I can say that manufacturing was on decline for quite a long time, with first symptoms appearing right at around 2009-2011. The way the new mayor of Shenzhen ordered to bulldoze all factories in city center at around 2009-2010 shows how much esteem Chinese government has for entrepreneurship. Can anybody imagine a governor of California ordering to bulldoze all silicon valley corporate campuses on a whim just because he wanted to have few hundreds more empty luxury shopping malls and 5 star hotels with blackjack and hookers?
    - dx034 8y ago
      Replacing SV corporate headquarters by skyscrapers would probably help lowering real estate prices a bit. And if Google had to rebuild their HQ it probably wouldn't even change quarterly income by a lot.
bocahrokok 8y ago
I believe this is third world countries problem not only India. In indonesia, my homeland, it also become problem, we focus to much on memorization while doesnt really care about problem solving
peteretep 8y ago
> India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups That may be true, but I've always just assumed the talent leaves. It's a big-ass place, with smart people, and lots of people in IT -- I've always assumed that anyone I speak to at an outsourced firm is someone who wasn't smart enough to get a tech job abroad.
kamaal 8y ago
>>Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups. The opposite in fact. The whole ecosystem is overflowing engineers. But what start ups want is people who can work for quite literally free, take no equity and work and make great sacrifices to make other people win(See Redbus, Foodpanda etc). >>The fault is the Indian education system, which silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards. So just like everywhere in the world? Also the many start ups won't touch your resume if you don't have IIT education. So much for not caring about 'report cards'. Report cards have value because the same start ups care about these things. You can't flip flop on certain values based on what ever is your urgent need. >>There are whole generations of students, who, from their early schooling, right up to a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, are taught to memorize and spit out answers. When you go interview at Google, the white board questions are literally your ability to become a question-answer bank of algorithm question. If you want to value pure ingenuity you need pay for it. You can't ask for one and complain you wanted the other. >>A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day. That is because there is a level how much of original creativity one can generate. >>Unless there is a revolution in the education system in India, it would be very difficult to have a large pool of talented problem solvers and creative thinkers. The revolution has been there for long. But companies interview for one set of skills and expect candidates to demonstrate a totally different set of skills at work.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day. That's not really unique, many American school children do the same for their homework. It's a time-honored tradition (at least since the internet has existed). Sometimes I wonder if the whole point of school isn't just to teach children how to game systems, which will be a useful skill in corporate jobs.
- jgh 8y ago
  Ah even before the internet was widely used you would go to the library and copy stuff out of encyclopedias. It just took longer :)
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    I was relatively young in the long-long-ago when there was no internet. I rephrased things from encyclopedias and biographies because the original wording was long and I was lazy. I'm unsure if that counts the same as copy-pasting because I still had to read and have a basic understand of what I'd read. It's possible people who were older at the time just straight-up copied the text though. I wouldn't be surprised.
    - intended 8y ago
      No - foreigners (ie non Indians / Chinese etc) are missing this fact : there’s 40 students to 1 teacher in india, or more. The exam and grading workload is unserviceable. This is the crux of it. And it’s the crux of MANY MANY other problems human beings face every day! Recruitment ? How do you prove that this person is actually an expert in his field/as good as he says he is withiut tying up my entire tech team in test checking? Online communication ? How do I know this information is correct? Who can provide proof of work for this comment? Testing is onerous- And when incentives and resources are inverted/out of Sync, it’s not possible to test effectively. This is the hidden factor. If all Indian/Chinese teachers could turn around tomorrow and complete assessments accurately, rote learning would drop dramatically. Failing that you must resort to large scale standardized testing. Which humans optimize for by just learning the test.
yorwba 8y ago
> these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day. In every education system I've ever participated in, that's how the majority of students deals with homework. I saw it in Germany from primary school to university. I saw it at a Chinese university. I saw PhD students get called out for copying from each other, with the TA writing "at least don't be so obvious about it" in the course chat. (Then he deleted the message for plausible deniability, of course.) I'm convinced that it's like this everywhere in the world. Creative problem solving is hard, and most students are constantly struggling to keep up. If they have no motivation to learn, there is not much that educators can do to make them learn. That wouldn't be such a problem if there weren't the motivation to be able to claim that they learned about something, when in fact they didn't. There are measures that can prevent cheating (today I got a warning that jammers would be in use around Chinese high schools to prevent cheating during the national exams), but you can't always enforce that students are actually studying instead of just pretending to. In the end the responsibility lies with the student to make an honest attempt before they resort to copying. I agree that such an education system doesn't create a large pool of talented problem solvers, but no country has a system that achieves that. The system is for everyone else, those who wouldn't even pretend to learn if they weren't forced to do so.
specialist 8y ago
"...these projects devolved into internet searches..." This is the 3rd millennium. Learning how to ask questions and find answers is a core competency. Along side critical thinking and problem solving, of course. I now keenly remember a 4th grade teacher who would drill the entire class with random trivia style questions. "Where is the capital of Botswana?" "What is the root word for 'homage'?" And us teams of kids would race to find the answers. Great fun. If home work assignments are easily fulfilled by quick searches and copypasta, the teacher is being lazy, not the students.

sho 8y ago

> silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards You can absolutely say that about the Chinese education system as well, and they seem to be doing OK. I agree it's a shame that creativity is undervalued, if not outright suppressed, by the education system, but at the same time I don't think entrepreneurial spirit arises from formal education in the first place.

StudentStuff 8y ago
Entrepreneurial spirit generally doesn't emerge from standard formal education, but not much is done to suppress it, and there are often extracurriculars to encourage young entrepreneurs. Rote memorization also only gets you so far, often you get tested on how you arrived at an answer, not just on the answer itself. Understanding the process is just as important as knowing it. Perhaps this is a bit like the schooling of Bolshevik Engineers versus American Engineers, the former had a much reduced curriculum that helped the USSR catch up in engineering talent on paper, meanwhile those engineers were missing key concepts that you need to understand to build planes, bridges and similar that won't spontaneously degrade.
- mantas 8y ago
  Fun part is, high school is/was the other way. USSR curriculum was full of stuff that 99% of students wouldn't ever use. There was little incentive to use anything in practice. You had to memorise, pass test and then you can forget it. This practice continues to this day in big parts of ex-Soviet sphere. I had plenty of teachers who took pride in saying that "stupid Americans learn this only in university!". Yet Americans I meet remember what they learned and know who to put it to use. Meanwhile I don't remember jack shit :D
  - kamaal 8y ago
    You highlighted a very important. Getting degrees for sake of getting degrees. This is a big thing in India too. People become engineers and then decide what they want to do.
  - paganel 8y ago
    > I had plenty of teachers who took pride in saying that "stupid Americans learn this only in university!" Can absolutely confirm this saying for Romania of the late '80s and throughout all of the '90s (so, even after the Wall had fallen).
    - mantas 8y ago
      It's still the same logic even today. Worst thing, updates programmes double down on pushing even more facts. While PISA scores are getting worse and worse. I guess it will take few generations to forget about glorious soviet schooling :(
  - kumarvvr 8y ago
    My teachers and peers and even parents used to say this and I would always be mighty proud of it.
  - collyw 8y ago
    We got Shakespeare.
kumarvvr 8y ago
I don't know much about China's IT sector, but at-least in their manufacturing sector, they have built up a sizable manufacturing base, not by being innovative, but by being sweatshops for western countries, and, ahem, borrowing their IP. Most Chinese companies that are on the radar now, like Xiaomi, have taken this path. They have learnt from western counterparts and built upon it.
- baybal2 8y ago
  As somebody whose career was linked to well being of the Chinese manufacturing sector I can say that manufacturing was on decline for quite a long time, with first symptoms appearing right at around 2009-2011. The way the new mayor of Shenzhen ordered to bulldoze all factories in city center at around 2009-2010 shows how much esteem Chinese government has for entrepreneurship. Can anybody imagine a governor of California ordering to bulldoze all silicon valley corporate campuses on a whim just because he wanted to have few hundreds more empty luxury shopping malls and 5 star hotels with blackjack and hookers?
  - dx034 8y ago
    Replacing SV corporate headquarters by skyscrapers would probably help lowering real estate prices a bit. And if Google had to rebuild their HQ it probably wouldn't even change quarterly income by a lot.

bocahrokok 8y ago

I believe this is third world countries problem not only India. In indonesia, my homeland, it also become problem, we focus to much on memorization while doesnt really care about problem solving

peteretep 8y ago

> India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups That may be true, but I've always just assumed the talent leaves. It's a big-ass place, with smart people, and lots of people in IT -- I've always assumed that anyone I speak to at an outsourced firm is someone who wasn't smart enough to get a tech job abroad.

kamaal 8y ago

>>Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups. The opposite in fact. The whole ecosystem is overflowing engineers. But what start ups want is people who can work for quite literally free, take no equity and work and make great sacrifices to make other people win(See Redbus, Foodpanda etc). >>The fault is the Indian education system, which silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards. So just like everywhere in the world? Also the many start ups won't touch your resume if you don't have IIT education. So much for not caring about 'report cards'. Report cards have value because the same start ups care about these things. You can't flip flop on certain values based on what ever is your urgent need. >>There are whole generations of students, who, from their early schooling, right up to a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, are taught to memorize and spit out answers. When you go interview at Google, the white board questions are literally your ability to become a question-answer bank of algorithm question. If you want to value pure ingenuity you need pay for it. You can't ask for one and complain you wanted the other. >>A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day. That is because there is a level how much of original creativity one can generate. >>Unless there is a revolution in the education system in India, it would be very difficult to have a large pool of talented problem solvers and creative thinkers. The revolution has been there for long. But companies interview for one set of skills and expect candidates to demonstrate a totally different set of skills at work.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

> A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day. That's not really unique, many American school children do the same for their homework. It's a time-honored tradition (at least since the internet has existed). Sometimes I wonder if the whole point of school isn't just to teach children how to game systems, which will be a useful skill in corporate jobs.

jgh 8y ago
Ah even before the internet was widely used you would go to the library and copy stuff out of encyclopedias. It just took longer :)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I was relatively young in the long-long-ago when there was no internet. I rephrased things from encyclopedias and biographies because the original wording was long and I was lazy. I'm unsure if that counts the same as copy-pasting because I still had to read and have a basic understand of what I'd read. It's possible people who were older at the time just straight-up copied the text though. I wouldn't be surprised.
  - intended 8y ago
    No - foreigners (ie non Indians / Chinese etc) are missing this fact : there’s 40 students to 1 teacher in india, or more. The exam and grading workload is unserviceable. This is the crux of it. And it’s the crux of MANY MANY other problems human beings face every day! Recruitment ? How do you prove that this person is actually an expert in his field/as good as he says he is withiut tying up my entire tech team in test checking? Online communication ? How do I know this information is correct? Who can provide proof of work for this comment? Testing is onerous- And when incentives and resources are inverted/out of Sync, it’s not possible to test effectively. This is the hidden factor. If all Indian/Chinese teachers could turn around tomorrow and complete assessments accurately, rote learning would drop dramatically. Failing that you must resort to large scale standardized testing. Which humans optimize for by just learning the test.

yorwba 8y ago

> these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day. In every education system I've ever participated in, that's how the majority of students deals with homework. I saw it in Germany from primary school to university. I saw it at a Chinese university. I saw PhD students get called out for copying from each other, with the TA writing "at least don't be so obvious about it" in the course chat. (Then he deleted the message for plausible deniability, of course.) I'm convinced that it's like this everywhere in the world. Creative problem solving is hard, and most students are constantly struggling to keep up. If they have no motivation to learn, there is not much that educators can do to make them learn. That wouldn't be such a problem if there weren't the motivation to be able to claim that they learned about something, when in fact they didn't. There are measures that can prevent cheating (today I got a warning that jammers would be in use around Chinese high schools to prevent cheating during the national exams), but you can't always enforce that students are actually studying instead of just pretending to. In the end the responsibility lies with the student to make an honest attempt before they resort to copying. I agree that such an education system doesn't create a large pool of talented problem solvers, but no country has a system that achieves that. The system is for everyone else, those who wouldn't even pretend to learn if they weren't forced to do so.

specialist 8y ago

"...these projects devolved into internet searches..." This is the 3rd millennium. Learning how to ask questions and find answers is a core competency. Along side critical thinking and problem solving, of course. I now keenly remember a 4th grade teacher who would drill the entire class with random trivia style questions. "Where is the capital of Botswana?" "What is the root word for 'homage'?" And us teams of kids would race to find the answers. Great fun. If home work assignments are easily fulfilled by quick searches and copypasta, the teacher is being lazy, not the students.