Education Reforms In India: Long Overdue

India has been nurturing the dream of becoming a 5-trillion-dollar economy for quite some time now. The government has set the target of USD5-trillion economy for itself by 2024-25. (The Economic Times, February 04, 2021). Given India’s demographic dividend and its availability till 2050, this target seems achievable. However in order to achieve this distant milestone within the stipulated time frame, every sector of the economy will need to come together and synergize. Not only that, the effort and the push will also have to come from the entire society.

We urgently need infrastructure, bureaucratic reforms, and the political will to create an ecosystem that can attract investment and stimulate economy. There is a need to build confidence and kickstart innovative businesses. Besides this, Indian companies must raise their standards to become competitive globally. Then only can we build reputation, enhance our share in the international trade, and increase our exports.

(Read: Competing Globally – The Next Milestone For India Inc.)

While all this is happening around us, and much has already been written about it, one sector that will play a pivotal role in this quest is education. Education will be the scaffolding on which our industry will grow and prosper. However, instead of hundreds and thousands of qualified graduates and post graduates, we are going to need educated and skilled professionals. Sounds complicated? Let me demystify. Currently, most university qualifications in our country do not always guarantee good education. Education means expertise in an area of specialization. Qualification on the other hand is the culmination of a journey through time in an educational institution leading to a degree printed on a piece of paper. There is no guarantee of expertise. We need to urgently bring education reforms in India if the country is to stand a chance of becoming what it aspires to be.

I can say this first hand because I have spent 25 years in the corporate world and the last 12 years in academia, delivering university education to management students. I have witnessed that our highly regulated education delivery system is suffocated and crumbling under its own weight. It has not kept up with the changing paradigms and has become obsolete. It creates tunnel vision in our teachers and the students alike, and all that they aim for is to somehow acquire a degree. With that degree they seek employment. There is no effort to acquire knowledge and skills. This qualification-focused ecosystem, without any emphasis on expertise, leads to mediocrity and mediocrity is not good for our country at this time. Excellence is!!

Coming back to the argument, we will need skills and not titles. Skills that our country desperately needs for competitive product design, time management, enhanced productivity, international quality, and most importantly, good corporate governance. Our education system will be challenged to provide the most important element of our campaign, and that is the human capital. Corporates, government sector, PSUs, SMEs, and every other sector of our economy will have to be aligned to the larger goal and will need a highly skilled and motivated workforce that can deliver international standards in whatever they do. Is our present education system poised to deliver such a workforce at all levels of hierarchy? I don’t think so. To validate my concerns, I will now talk about specific problems that plague our education system and also propose solutions to these problems. In order to remain unambiguous, I shall dissect the system into its two major components and discuss their inability to deliver in their current avatars. Alongside, I shall also propose the steps that need to be taken in order to realign our education to meet our current requirements.

Also Read: 3 Golden Steps That Make Freshers Get Hired Instantly

Structure & Organization

Currently, our schools, colleges, and universities are governed by near obsolete policies. Take for example, the process of recruitment of teachers. Teachers are mostly evaluated and recruited on the basis of a number of checkboxes ticked in a checklist that has not been updated for decades. These checkboxes are mostly for university qualifications and publications on quantitative parameters. No specific methods to do a qualitative assessment. Teaching is a specialized skill that is acquired by practice and passion and just like the armed forces, it is not to be considered an ordinary job that pays money. The recruiters must explore passion and commitment in the prospective teacher. I propose the following reforms to the structure of our teaching system.

• The Regulatory Environment – The regulators of education in our country such as AICTE, UGC and the DTEs need to revisit their policies with respect to conferring degrees and recognizing educational institutions. They define hierarchical levels in educational institutions based entirely on educational qualifications, degrees I mean. There is hardly any place for skills or hands on experience in the evaluation criteria for teachers. Policy making panels should have more representations from the industry, consulting houses, and even startups. Qualifications alone should not be looked at pointers towards competency. Skills and industry experience should also find a place in the assessment criteria.
• Teachers Recruitment – As a direct outcome of the above parameter, most educational institutions recruit teachers to comply and not to teach. Unless they have a certain proportion of teachers with a specific qualification, the continuance of their recognition is at stake. Consequently the educational institutions race to recruit teachers whose resumes check the maximum number of boxes in the recruitment checklist. Just as not every one who enrolls at an acting school becomes an actor, not everybody with a paper degree is competent to be a teacher. Hence it is more important to devise methods to evaluate teaching skills as well as the qualifications.
• Teacher Appraisal – Teacher appraisals should be based on metrics such as class engagement statistics, student attendance in the classes, knowledge transfer evaluation and not solely on the number of research articles written. Many teachers write research papers just to keep their jobs. You can well imagine what that research be useful for. Most such researches are rephrased texts tailored to escape plagiarism checks.
• Student Evaluation – Conventional evaluation systems are designed to not evaluate students’ actual learning but their ability to mug up answers. More open book examinations and more application based evaluations should be incorporated. Continuous assessments and feedback will be a true test of the incremental development of students. Demonstrative evaluations, rather than descriptive evaluations can bring out the necessary skills required to succeed in the professional life.
• Quality Accreditations – Accreditation of educational institutions has become a benchmark, fashionable though. Without naming, many teaching accreditation agencies majorly focus on measuring and enhancing input metrics and hardly have any systems to monitor student development. That puts undue pressure on institutions and teachers to comply from the perspective of passing the audits. Again checklists! The learning gets lost somewhere. Complying with audit requirements of the accreditation agencies also gives a false sense of achievement and well being to the teachers. Unfortunately education accreditation agencies market their brands aggressively and educational institutions use accreditation brands to leverage their brand associations, especially if they lack branding of their own.

The Intellectual Capital

What we teach in our classrooms has become obsolete long back. In order to preserve relevance, content needs to be updated through research and experience. One needs to acknowledge and accept the changing expectations from the education system. It should support the evolving requirements of the society, the industry, the politics and the governance. Here are the most immediate concerns and the suggested reforms that need to be brought about to make education more relevant to life and work, and contribute towards nation building.

1. Engagement – The modern classroom has evolved completely. The stakeholders of the classroom have different motivations and challenges than what used to be some 20-25 years ago. The role and authority of teachers in the classroom have also evolved. Teachers are no longer expected to assert themselves using authority or coercion. They need to be trained on class engagement technique that are both, non punitive, and motivating. They need to be original and should be able to use multiple methods of knowledge delivery. Demonstrative teaching, the use of audio visual aids, narrating personal experiences related to the topic, and the usage of props are some of the commonly used methods by modern teachers. In addition, students need to be encouraged to participate in the class. One sure method of doing that is by not penalizing a student for giving a wrong answer, rather rewarding the initiative and participation. Under all circumstances, a teacher needs to make his class a a happy place for everyone rather than a trench of horrors. It is easier said than done but take my words, it is possible.

2. Content – Research and knowledge creation should be influenced in such a way that research is driven by the desire to explore and not by the threat of stagnating or loosing one’s job. Often times, universities and institutions insist on research to satisfy regulator norms. As a consequence, the requirement to conduct and publish research work has become a quantitative compulsion rather than a qualitative desire. Unfortunately, as a result, the entire intellectual ecosystem gets compromised.

3. Exposure – In order to prepare our current and future generations to take on global competition and emerge victorious, we need to upskill our population. Obtaining academic qualifications should not be the only benchmark for our teachers at any level. The entire ecosystem of education must focus on practical training and real life exposure that our teachers must acquire and possess to be able to impart practical skills that are so badly needed. Can a medical professor who himself has never treated a patient teach medicine to students? Can a flight instructor who has never flown an aircraft himself teach trainee pilots to fly? If the answer is no then why do we allow our teachers teach subjects they have never practiced? It is not fair to trust the future of an entire generation and the country in the hands of people who only have paper qualifications.

4. Creativity – Agreed there should be order and process in every educational institution. Nevertheless, there should be some room for the creativity for every teacher. If there are too many compliances and a very complicated reporting structure for a teacher, two problems will arise. One, the teacher does not find time to think of innovative ways to transfer knowledge in the classroom. Secondly, too much compliance and reporting gives a feeling of false well being to the teacher in the classes because then everything is benchmarked quantitatively and if the required quantitative objectives are met, the teacher feels he has done a good job. There should be some room for qualitative assessment that should be left to the teacher. However, for this to happen, there has to be a lot of trust between all the stakeholders of education and the success of this approach will also largely depend on the teacher recruitment methods and parameters.

5. Skill Mapping- Finally along with the qualifications, skill mapping should be done for teachers being assigned to teach a particular area. For e.g. someone may have acquired a degree in literature by simply studying the course for its duration and passing the exams. But does he or she actually possess the ability to teach literature? This is important for someone trying to teach literature in the classroom. Otherwise the class will be purely a quantitative activity, leading to many more such degrees in literature without any affinity towards literature.

Having said all that above, I repeat, our universities must emphasize on not just imparting fancy educational degrees, but also skills and knowledge that are so desperately required to build our nation!!!