Education has always been a great matter of national concern in our country since time immemorial. Many articles and reports have been written, suggestions have been made, researches and surveys have been done but the desired goal still seems to be a mirage for us. Even in the days when our literacy rate is getting better by each passing day, the real education scenario is grimmer than it ever had been.
Nowadays, students getting more than 90% are not a rare sight at all but still admissions for those meritorious ones in good colleges is an uncertainty. Every nook and cranny of the masses is filled with the desire to study just for scoring marks as if knowledge and educational excellence are matters too trivial in nature to be noticed. The method of rote learning and memorization seems to be the ultimate way for success for the budding students.
People hardly feel or realize that such a system of education is fit only for producing good quality clerks and officers as it did for the British who required them for their colonial administration and ambitions. But sadly such methodologies are stale and vague in this modern world. It will surely create good officers but never good engineers, doctors, scientists, researchers, administrators or other experts who require quality intelligence, improvisations or dexterity.
The “Great Indian Rat Race” to excel in this struggling world of recessions and unemployment to find a comfortable job and lifestyle is driving the students as well as their parents crazier than ever. Humongous pressure and precise demands have put many lives at peril in many a different ways so much so that hundreds of student suicides occur in India every year. Majority of them are linked to the immense load subjected on them by the entire education system.
Often it is found that the reason behind the crisis is cited as the lack of infrastructure and financial aid. Even if the infrastructure is enhanced and financial aid being injected into the system, the situation still remains worse. The proper mindset to utilize the infrastructure wisely and diversify the funds rationally still remains unseen. It must be remembered that mere erection of some schools and colleges will never change the scenario.
The large number of dropouts, qualified yet unemployed students as well as undeserving treatment to brilliant students are a major nuisance. The more India carries on with such a vague mindset for proper education, radical development of the nation will never be attained at all. It must be understood by one and all that education is a field of excellence and it can only be achieved by creativity and ingenuity.
India will be able to boast of a proper education system only when it felicitates the meritorious for their excellence, promotes original thinking, creativity and innovation, vociferously promote indigenous research and redefines the meaning of education in the society.
Our nation will only be able to reap the benefits of a good education system only if the aforesaid are implemented in reality. When the quality of education increases, the masses are technology savvy; “Brain Drain of home grown talent” is resisted and indigenous technology is evolved like never before; only then can India say that it is indeed a seat of education. The country of great rational thinkers will only then feel to have had its dream come true.