Sunday, August 12, 2012

India's Education System - The End Justifies the Means

Around July every, the results of India's HSC examinations are announced. The results of these university entrance exams dictate the futures of most Indians. The top scoring students are felicitated by the media, are offered choice scholarships by India's top universities, and many end up at the America's leading universities.

Before the keys to the kingdom are handed over to these "Board toppers," perhaps we should question the process that pushes them to the top.

India's State Education Boards are the clearinghouse for all university level admissions, which are based purely on the results of those final exams. No points are given to any other extra-curricular pursuits, or more importantly for even attending classes during the school year. The most glaring problem lies in the socialist era law that enables State Boards to set a ceiling on school fees, supposedly to protect the poor. Since the ceiling is far lower than the market equilibrium price, all schools and junior colleges (11th and 12th grade) are forced to economize. Student-teacher ratios suffer, quality of teaching suffers, facilities suffer, and eventually all education suffers.

This low price ceiling creates a quality gap that is immediately fulfilled by remedial ‘tuition classes’. Such private after-school classes do not come under the jurisdiction of any School Board and thus are only answerable to the free market. They can charge any fees they want, however the market demands that these charges are justified by the results that they deliver year after year. This might be free market transparency and accountability at its finest, but the end results are creating massive distortions in India’s education system.

These private coaching classes that started off as remedial service-providers have now ballooned into institutions larger and far better than the schools they were originally supposed to supplement. Sparkling clean classrooms, some even air-conditioned, low student-teacher ratios, personalized attention, 24-hour libraries and reading rooms. They offer clean, safe, environments conducive to learning, the very opposite to the chaos that most Indian schools and junior colleges offer.

The entire incentive system gets progressively perverted. Most pre-university students barely attend regular classes but concentrate on their private coaching classes. Repeatedly encountering such widespread institutionalized apathy, teachers inevitably lose their enthusiasm for teaching. Most coach private classes on the side, which are a far more lucrative source of income. The teacher’s primary day job becomes simply a platform to advertise for, and to garner credibility for, their evening private coaching classes. This self-perpetuating cycle continues; Students know about teacher apathy and skip more college classes to attend private tuition classes. India’s heritage institutions of learning fall into disrepair while shiny new coaching classes come up next door. The vicious vortex continues its downward spiral. 

Meanwhile, the ‘coaching classes’ industry, like any other industry, turns out its own high-performing classes and low-performing classes. So great is the rush for getting into the ‘higher-results-delivering’ classes that a third level of private classes have sprung up to coach students to get into the second level. Private remedial classes to help students get into the elite private remedial classes that are making up for stifled education systems. It cannot possibly get any more absurd than that.  

Entire generations of young pre-university students do not attend regular day classes and hang around waiting for their tenured teachers to leave their official jobs and start evening private remedial classes. This doubles the time spent for the same output, effectively halving productivity.  This enormous loss of time and productivity of an entire nation’s youth has enormous social consequences. For example, despite having the world’s largest student population, India produces almost no international caliber student athletes. India’s Olympic medal tally has steadily decreased over time. 2008 Olympics medal totals – China: 100, USA: 110, India: 3.

This entire description might lead one to believe that the academic content of Indian syllabii is of an extremely difficult nature. On the contrary, most of it is quite basic and often repetitive, and encourages rote learning instead of rewarding originality and creativity. Even if students were after the genuine pursuit of knowledge, the very nature of this systems forces them into looking for the ‘formula’ for cracking entrance examinations to get into scarce colleges. This is precisely the highly sought after service that private remedial classes provide. These classes provide reams of pre-written answers to examination questions – for all subjects, even languages and liberal arts – that students are supposed to memorize and regurgitate.

Official textbooks are supplemented by privately published ‘Guides’ that are full of pre-written answers to examination questions. A “good student” is someone that has spent hundreds of hours re-transcribing these guides by hand. As such, not only is the concept of ‘plagiarism’ absent from the lexicon and alien to most, there is institutional and societal encouragement of it; India’s “best” students are those who best able to plagiarize entire exam solutions from memory.

Around July every year, when the results of university entrance exams are announced, these “top students” become minor celebrities – their pictures adorn the front pages of all newspapers, their remedial classes offer them cash rewards, and so on. Little boys and girls across the country dream to grow up and excel at similar plagiarism one day.  

This system, set in motion in the 1950s with perhaps the best of intentions, has now led to the creation of a nation whose educated classes were taught during their formative years that the “end justifies the means’. Now, sixty years and about four generations later, this view has become the 'De facto' lens for viewing all aspects of life.   

This immense apathy spreads to other spheres of life, resulting in the eradication of a questioning citizenry that is vital to any democracy. This is where the fabric of Indian society begins to rip apart.    

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