Indian Educational System

What comes to your mind when I write the words- mugging up, science groups and engineering? That's right, most of you should have screamed Indian education system by now. Most of us who're privileged enough to afford an education have been part of this stressful and confusing system that India uses to groom its youth. We have preschools to train children who're barely out of their mother's wombs. We have nursery schools dishing out tons of homework for parents and children alike. We have middle schools and high schools where we're made to idealize science and math as the only revered subjects in the world. Eleventh grade and twelfth grade teaches us the magical art of mugging up, preparing us for the tough science and technology related courses ahead. College is a whole different confusing maze where we're all made to believe that engineering is the only course that there is to learn. I wouldn't have to explain the mad goose chase for marks. We've all been there sitting on our benches and memorizing math equations, praying that this should be the only sum that comes in the question paper.

Amidst all this pressure, we fail to learn whatever that is necessary for us in life. Our teachers have been so busy teaching us techniques to score high marks, that they failed to teach us the mechanism to cope with failure if we were to cross its path. A student commits suicide every hour in India and we're still stuck scribbling our artworks and poems in the last page of our rough notebooks, while trying hard to mug up physics when our parents are watching. According to our system, it doesn't matter if you have a passion for art, dance, singing, writing or politics, in the end we all must write the same exam and take up the same science group to be approved as an 'intelligent' student by this society.

We're all familiar with the hierarchy that comes with college degrees. If you're a humanities student, you will be inevitably pushed lower in the hierarchy. The top strata is still held by the science and technology students, who Indian parents believe are the smartest of the lot. When I told my own parents that I wanted to pursue a B.A degree after taking up the Bio-math group in school, they looked at me like I'd gone mad. My friends wondered as to why I'm ruining my life by myself. See that's the comment that you get when you tell somebody that you're taking up a humanities related course for your under graduation, they'll ask you if you find math and science difficult. No, we do not find them difficult, we merely believe that India has enough engineers to take care of its machines but not enough humanitarians to take care of its citizens.

The Indian system of education never really prepares you for what life is. We're so used to being taught about just success stories, that we've stopped looking at what life is, after a failure hits us.12 percent of Indian students between the age of 4 to 16 suffer from psychiatric disorders. You could be suffering from psychiatric disorders, I could be suffering from psychiatric disorders, but all our teachers would ever ask us is "How much did you score in your exam?".

According to Malala, "One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world", if these things can change the world then imagine how big a progress India would achieve if we just altered the way we nurtured our future tax payers.