What should one know about the Indian education system?

Here are some things that everyone should be aware about when it comes to Indian education system.

• “Real” education

We are educating our students, but we still are not able to give them the right kind of education. Indian school and institutes of higher studies aim at directing our intelligence in just one direction and that murders various other potential skills in us.

Our creativity and our extra-curricular skills are lowered down and then made to be forgotten in order to make us think and act in a specific institutionalized way.

Indian education system encourages us to become the part of a rat race, instead of encouraging to explore the opportunities in our own ways. Right from class 1, we are told to mug up the syllabus, vomit it out on the answer sheet, and score the highest marks possible.

We are never encouraged to think out of the box and hence become the slaves of our education. All that the purpose of India education remains, is to teach children how to come first in the class.

Every parent wants her/his children to become engineer or doctor. No one is ready to settle with a writer, or a painter, or a singer, or even a chef. Such professions are considered frivolous and not worthy of being respected.

Our obsession with engineers and doctors have made major Indian institutions a production house of them.

“There is an endemic shortage of teachers with even the IITs reporting a 20% to 30% shortfall in faculty. Indian universities, if one goes by average, revise their curricula only once in 5 to 10 years but by then they get defeated in both letter and spirit,” says speakingtree.in.

Also many of the teachers are either unwilling or incompetent, and hence always in a hurry to complete the syllabi and get done with the “responsibility” as soon as possible. Teachers themselves are not trying to help students get a quality education. There are various schools where asking too many questions and exhibiting too much curiosity is discouraged vehemently.

A very big problem with Indian education system is the privatization of education which has left government schools in a declining condition. The infrastructure we find in such schools is not suitable for any kind of serious studies to take place.

This lack of infrastructure has created a gap between the education that rich and poor get. And the gap becomes more visible as these children grow up and enter the job sector.

Also read this:- How poor countries can use technology to improve their education sector?

India being a diverse country, embraces innumerable regional languages, but still the desired medium of instruction all over is English. English still remains that language in India, with which many of us struggle with because we know surviving without it is not a choice we Indians have.

From where have we got this mindset? The answer is, “our educational institutions, where we used to get fined for speaking in any other language than English.”

Reports tell that 70% of knowledge that we gain through our education is rendered useless while we go to seek jobs, and this is the main reason of the increasing rate of unemployment in India.

Indian education system lacks practicality, and is full of bookish, theoretical knowledge which is considered useless when a big firm hires employees.

• Reservation

It is the biggest drawback of Indian system, which is often dubbed as Indian reservation system, because it is preventing a major chunk of deserving candidates to get their fair share of opportunities. This has also promoted hatred and prejudices among different castes amongst youngsters.

Indian education is very cheap. You can complete your education for some paltry amount in a Government-run or Government-aided school. Again in higher education, most government institutions are way cheaper compared to institutions in other countries.

Indian education system has very little interference from religious fundamentalists. Compared to resistance that topics like Evolution faces in the US, Indian education system is relatively free and relies only on science for its curriculum. There are occasional incidents of incorporating non-sense in the syllabus (like Veg. people are better than non-Veg people). But, it is mostly fine.

Bullying was minimum in schools that I went to. College introduces everyone to bullying in the name of "ragging". But, everything is quiet manageable.

For the most part, history is taught just as it is understood to have happened. Though only North Indian empires and kingdoms are covered in great detail compared to empires in other regions, it does not alter certain portion of the history to fit certain political goals (something that is done in a few other countries).

One other answer mentions that Maths is given importance. I agree with that. This is both good as well as a bad point - many engineers vs Math stealing talented students from other subjects.