Education – it’s one of things people feel strongly about and triggers an emotional response. Despite after all what’s being told about brightening future of India, let’s face it: India’s education system sucks. Consider an ordinary scene in a class room: teacher comes inside the class, students say good-morning, scribbles equations on the board with the help of a text book, students in turn copy from the board to take notes. On the day of the exam, you’re asked questions from the book and students promptly write down what they have memorized. I don’t know about you, but I think education has more to do with…er, educating. Like, making students learn new things. The education system here hardly deserves the adjective “education”. It merely exists to fill the vacuum if it weren’t present.
Things don’t change much once you get to college. Students are often engulfed in a vicious circle of tests, assignments and semester exams; and in this hectic race to secure a good GPA, the true aim of learning is forgotten. The thing is, almost everyone knows that all the theoretical things they teach you at college will never really help you much besides getting you a good GPA. So you really think that after memorizing a few problems in engineering mechanics, that you have learned something in the subject? No, not a chance. Unless you get ready to experiment, to get down and dirty with your hands, you’re not actually learning anything. You won’t be doing science.
But hold your horses; don’t we have a practical section for exactly that purpose?
Ok, just wait. An experiment is something you do to determine the nature of the world around us, by patient observation. It requires some degree of curiosity, an inquisitive thirst for knowledge. Applying knowledge thus gained requires even more experimentation. Agreed? Now look at an ordinary practical session in schools and colleges. You follow the instructions given in the procedure, you take down readings and complete observation and the record notebook (which seems to be most of the work devoted to practicals). Nowhere during the practicals are you actually experimenting. Practicals are another ritual to be performed by today’s students.
Even engineering and science require good creative minds, perhaps at least as much as art does. It’s hard for creativity to flourish in this kind of place where the highest rewards go not to persons of high thinking caliber but to persons who tend to memorize. To repeat what others have said requires no brain at all, to come up something totally new – that requires every bit of brain power you could muster. Many times it had been said that classes will dull your brains. Here the situation is even worse – classes will make you even forget that you have a brain.
About the Author: Hi, just a wandering teen who blogs a bit about this and that. 