Our Education System

"Education is not given for the purpose of earning a living;
Its learning what to do with a living after you have earned it" ---------Abraham Lincoln

It took me a while to decide what should be my first post. I decided to start with the present day education system. Its utility in one's life. It's significance in nurturing one's personality.

The primary goal of today's education system seems to be earning a livelihood, nothing else. This kind of utilitarian scheme of education can help in producing people who are capable of supporting themselves economically, hopefully; but one cannot help wondering if this is all what we want.

I am not against acquiring knowledge for professional success also. It is a competitive world today. Children have to face the competition and hence, be prepared for this. But the pressure of competition has increased to this extent that right from infancy the child is fed with ideas of becoming an engineer or a doctor. A child who is still understanding his or her world around, we brain wash him or her into believing that the be-all and end-all of the learning process is to do well in examinations. These days doing well means nothing less than cent percent. Anything less than 100% is looked down upon. It is important that students are made aware of the importance of academic scores, but equally necessary is to build a foundation so that they are capable of dealing with difficult and new situations.

Our present education system lays more stress on cramming information. I will not call that information either. It is just data as everyone is so busy stuffing the child with all kinds of data that s/he is not able to develop the capacity to derive information from the vast store of data in their brains. Strangely enough, the more data we are provided with, the less well-informed we become. But who realizes that "information overload" is never fruitful.

I am still to meet real engineers, although I am surrounded by B.Techs. How many real doctors do we have around, albeit we have a crowd of doctors these days? Though there are many Ph.Ds, we have dearth of scientists in the real sense.

I will end at this note that more stress should be laid on developing the discriminating intellect to analyze the right or wrong rather than just data - overloading!!