Will education make a comeback in India? Republic day thoughts

What can we  do on republic day as responsible, intelligent citizens apart from engaging in rituals like flag hoisting? Can we do anything productive?

May be we can use it for introspection. We can all think about the country – and wonder how we can contribute to the future. And maybe we can share our thoughts with other responsible citizen.

I am a teacher, an educator – not in the conventional sense – but I know that is what I have set out to do. I have never held a teaching position in any University or college – but I have taught in many classes for hundreds of hours. I am responsible for teaching practical aspects of law to a few hundred  students from more than 50 different institutions/colleges/ universities. Hence – my thoughts are about education in India. 

Will education make a come back in India?

Education has taken a back seat to entertainment today. There was a time when TV and radio channels used to broadcast education themed programmes for hours every week. Many people even bought newspapers to learn more about the world, to be more educated. Today newspapers have become entertainment, newshours in TV, even, are more about entertainment than information and learning.

But what pushed education in the back row in a country like India?

As a country, we put a huge premium on education. We understand the value of education. Education may have been pushed out of the media, but most of my classmates made the biggest expenditures of their life on their law school education. My parents didn’t take a house building loan until I graduated (though on most part I managed to pay my own fees) lest I need money for education. My maid spends more on her daughter’s education than on her rent.

But as a country, we have also failed to develop a fair and efficient education system. Taking the government out of business, end of License Raj has led to a media boom, telephone boom, and tremendous growth in a lot of other sectors. However, the government determines what our children and youth should learn until today. “Syllabus”. What does the government know about what people wants to learn? Did the government know what Indians want to watch on TV, or that Sadhu’s going to Kumbh Mela wants to have mobile phones? Our education system is myopic because our education is hugely dependent on the government and controlled as well. At private schools that come at great cost, some innovations are taking place. But over all – it’s a bleak picture.

Even the private education system has largely failed us so far, because it did not target education as a goal, it did not target developing students into great human beings, not even great workers – they built maggu information crammers designed to maximize scores in exams. This phenomenon can be seen throughout schools and colleges. Some lip service is given to practical education, the rest is all about competing for marks. Can you crack JEE? What about Medical or law entrance? No one is bothered about teaching skills to students which will make them better at learning, better at living, better at dreaming.

Gardner said that human beings have nine types of intelligence – our school system is built of barely one, or at best two of these. We have an education system geared towards raring a species of rat-racers and back-stabbers trained to tolerate endless red tape.

In higher education, our private institutions do not aim to craft great professionals. They are geared towards, and incentivized to dole out degrees – engineering, management, law – name it. The regulators clearly have not done their job – and in absence of choice, students join these institutes knowing very well that they may not learn enough to get a job at the end of it all – or maybe they will. When the entire eco-system is screwed up, even the recruiters have to hire whatever talent is available and train them at their own cost!

The Indian private higher education paradox…

Unlike all the other sectors, the little privatization that has happened in higher education seems to have delivered opposite results. It seems that government run institutions are generally better than most of the private education initiatives. Where are the private institutions which will beat the IITs, IIMs, or National Law Universities? Presidency colleges and St. Xaviers’s in various metros still draw the best crowd – but why no new private colleges are competing with them? It’s a paradox. In every other sector, private entities are more efficient, more innovative and result oriented. What happened with the higher education sector in India then? Many private colleges and even deemed universities have come up – why are they all mediocre at best?

I have a few reasons in mind – and listen to them carefully – because the secret of fixing our education system is hidden in them.

There is no real free market in education as far as India is concerned, except for some peripheral learning industry.

Even if there are private colleges, only their infrastructure and origin would be private. What courses will be taught, what kind of people can teach, what will be their salary, why will be the syllabus etc are directly or indirectly decided by the government. Look at the following issues:

1. There is not enough incentive to be great: If a mobile company provides cheap and great access to its services, it can keep adding millions of subscribers. If you become the best law school or engineering college in the country, you can not add millions of students in your class. A good service professional can keep increasing his fees from time to time as his service offering and reputation increases. You can not even do that in educational institutions. Where is the incentive to drastically improve and becoming world class?
2. You can’t hire Steve Jobs for INR 30,000 a month. In any case, there is no scope for managers and innovators in education. In any case, you’ll hear from every Jack and Jill that education is sacred and no one should do business with education. You will hear about hospitality management, healthcare management, event management, aircraft management and even dinner table management – but education management? Never. How do you expect education to boom like the media industry or hotel industry – if the people managing it are old head masters and deans who have never lifted a finger in their life to learn anything about business?
3.  The biggest scope for innovation is in the content. However, what content can be taught is limited by what is tested by government approved boards of education in board exams. Lets say, research shows that learning music at the age of 14 drastically improves analytical skills of a child and increases his self-esteem and creativity. Now if you try to implement some music lessons in schools – then good luck – because parents want their children to prepare for the exams and be a topper. Learning music will cut into the time the “study time”. As long as we continue these vicious board exams – we have little hope of seeing serious innovations based on modern scientific research in our high school education system. The early school system is still seeing some nascent innovations and diversity due to absence of such exams in early school stage.

So what about innovation in higher education? Very little innovation is possible within the government framework and current educational system. Outside that system, of course innovation has been taking place. In fact, outside the “system”, education businesses have benefited from economy of scale and attracted talent. The best examples of this will be the various coaching centres – for IIT JEE, CAT etc. Education does not mean reading books and cracking exams only – look at Shimak Davar’s dance classes to see how brands build up around learning. Of course, there have been various brands that teach languages, especially English speaking. These brands have innovated, scaled up, faced competition and excellent ones have emerged battle-hardened. One of the important reasons which made this possible was the fact that they have grown in unregulated areas, without UGC to prescribe standards, syllabus, number of seats and dictate salary for teachers.

While unregulated peripheral education has been doing well – what about the core education system? Is there any hope for it?

Well, the traditional education system is unlikely to see sudden surge of innovations and drastic improvement in quality, or even a tremendous increase in number of seats.

However, as has been talked about many times, ubiquity of mobiles and broadband penetration gives us some hope, that if the government does not suddenly decide to regulate this sector as well – perhaps this will be the medium that will tap into the educational potential of emerging India, and drive innovation and diversity in the learning space. The hugely unsatisfied educational appetite of the Indian mass may whet a new brand of content generators, internet and media companies.

We at iPleaders, are betting on this space.

This article, in substance, was first published in our E-learning blog – https://startup.nujs.edu