It's my first post here, so starting my Steemit life by writing on Today's education system, as I'm a private tutor.
Today's Education may be good to score marks, but fails to retain the knowledge once the students completed their examinations. This lead to young minds being stifled at an age when they should be asking questions, learning and gaining knowledge, and developing a thirst for more knowledge .
If we need to solve this dubious mystery about why this education system for decades, have not been able to invent or innovate something that could revolutionise the way we live, the answer may well lie in the kind of education system we have right from the early school days. Our basic education system is rigid, rusty and mundane. Among school children, it hardly evokes an interested that could ignite a scientific spark that carry forward in their lives.
That's why we pack innovating or inventing capabilities despite the fact that lakhs of engineer and scientists graduate from their respectable academic institutions year after year but go without making any substantial contributions to the existing scientific knowledge pool.
The daily lives of common people riddled with a range of problems — be it water shortage or pollution in the cities, rising fuel prices, or mass transport systems — hardly an Indian has come forward with innovative ideas or an invention that could solve the problems or even mitigate them. This speaks volumes — negatively — about the quality of our scientific human resource pool. And we have nothing but our basic education system to be blamed.
Savitri Rao, mother of an 11-year-old studying in fifth standard in an ICSE school in Bangalore ( India) , complains that the manner in which her son is being taught restricts him from actually thinking about what he is doing. “It’s a rut more than anything else,” says the disgusted mother. “And it hardly serves any purpose except for a sheet of paper that will be the licence to study further; nothing more,” she adds.
For instance, in mathematics, there are several ways a particular problem can be solved. “But here, what I see is that although he gets the answer right, his marks are deducted because he has used a different method than what his teacher taught him. It is evident that the teachers want them to do precisely what they teach them, and the children blindly follow this rote learning, bookish ways,” says Rao
In a situation like this, it also restricts the children from questioning teachers as to why they can’t resort to other methods when they too are the right ways of solving the sums; or even raising doubts or queries about something that they feel needs to be done.
The result is this: “You sit with him and observe his way of studying, not just mathematics, but any subject; and you realise that what he is doing is not actually learning, but cramming and mugging to score marks,” says Rao.
Educational and psychological experts admit that such a style of studying may be good to score marks, but they fail to retain the knowledge once they have completed their examinations. This leads to the young minds being stifled at an age when they should actually be asking questions, learning and gaining knowledge, and developing a thirst for more knowledge. This is the seed that ignites inventive and innovative tendencies among the children even as they grow into adulthood.