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The sorry state of education is a distraction, the real problem is something else. Most students in India are not given much of a choice when it comes to choosi
by gingerjoos 14y ago
The sorry state of education is a distraction, the real problem is something else. Most students in India are not given much of a choice when it comes to choosing their career path. Most of the students are forced to be doctors, engineers or civil servants. Very few end up being artists, singers, sports-person... anything which is not a "real" job.
The result being that a host of colleges have sprung up to meet this demand. These colleges are setup with the sole aim of making money. Education is just a side effect. Students get no academic freedom and have no space to learn outside of a very narrowly defined "syllabus".
The worse problem is that most students who end up in Engineering Colleges have absolutely no interest in becoming engineers. They do manage to somehow graduate and get an "IT job". They end up being mediocre engineers and at the earliest opportunity try to find a way out. These poor souls end up giving a bad name to Indian Engineers.
What about those who want to be engineers because they like to build things and love to tinker around? The hacker types? Getting into an engineering college requires a lot of money. If and when they do get into an engineering college it's a poor quality one. They are forced to spend time only on mugging up equations and theorems. They get no space to build circuits of their own or blow up stuff for the heck of it. Assignments are a joke, they require no application of thought and all that's required is merely copying stuff from the text book onto paper. The poor dispirted hackers end up languishing in low paying jobs or find an escape route by moving out of the country where their talents are recognised.
tl;dr : Quality suffers when quantity increases beyond limit.
- Tsagadai 14y agoWith growth in the middle classes you will get a lot more people not working "real" jobs. This is a repeated pattern across the world. First everyone forces their children into the money-making professions. Then the second generation attempts to not repeat the choices their parents made for them that they resented. Eventually, it evens out and you get people who do what they want to do.
- sown 14y agoIt sounds like education could be even more disrupted there than here?
- gingerjoos 14y agoDefinitely! At the very least some labs where hackers could come and make stuff with Arduino boards or write IRC bots that did crazy, but useless things. All for the sake of learning.
- kamaal 14y agoFor that to succeed you need to ensure technical folks getting hired are very well compensated. The issue is most people coming from middle class background have big dreams to make money, build a good home and settle down. So the crowd goes where the money is. Sure there are going to be passionate people, but if its not rewarding sooner or later they are going ask if its worth it.
- gingerjoos 14y agoOne thing that could help is a surge of tech-oriented startups. Startups in India tended to be copies of well-established models in the U.S. Things are beginning to change. I've personally seen a few startups which have innovative and tech-heavy products founded in India which caters to the U.S. market.
- intended 14y agoActually this is what STEM fetishization gets you. Its a cautionary tale for what happens when you have nothing but STEM as the bar for worth and value. Your STEM degree and then masters dictates how people perceive you, provide marriage offers, respect you and a huge swathe of other social niceties. Its what creates our student suicides, competitions to place kids in a strategic school to jump start their STEM education. Its the root for tution/cram classes that start 2 years before the final exam and absorb vacation and free time. Its the cause of having a huge amount of useless engineering schools that just print out degrees after you pay a hefty fee. Further you have non-STEM people doing STEM. They don't care about the subject and never will. For them slope is a pointless concept. The teachers are over worked and have to correct a million different papers. On top of that since there is finally a national level test - so people just start teaching the test. This generates tonnes of unmotivated rote learning. I've seen a student draw a circuit diagram, by starting at the lower left corner and sketch upwards to the right. He may as well have been forging a picture from memmory. Its frustrating. With regards to disruption. I know of several pushes to disrupt the industry. Someone I know is starting an extensive skillling course targeted at slums - the aim is to train plumbers, electricians and secretaries. Education had also recently been the flavor of the month for investment purposes (I think early in the year). Right now I don't think thats so popular. At the end of the day though, most of the education disruptions seem to ignore the lessons of education - namely that the fundamental unit of chaos in society is human beings. Startups balk at this and then try to solve the easier problem of matching the requirements of an education board and their metrics of learning.
- kamaal 14y agoActually a friend of mine joking said- In India, we call our least of area of incompetence as our passion. Which actually happens to be very true.