Fix India’s broken education system
ilar situation. The question is: Since when did our teachers turn into sacrificial lambs? They have been revered by everybody from the rishis of the vaidik era to Guru Nanak, since times immemorial.
In fact, the lack of a clear-cut educational policy after Independence resulted in our educational institutions becoming victims of apathy. There was a time when Allahabad University was known as the Oxford of the East. Banaras Hindu University and Shanti Niketan were compared with Gurukuls. Delhi University was renowned for its classicism and Jawaharlal Nehru University for its progressive values. Pune’s Ferguson and UP’S Agra College were also rated highly. While teaching here, scholars such as Anant Sadashiv Altekar and Manohar Ray never felt they were second to anybody. The commercialisation of education has given us a generation of semi-literate lecturers and rudderless youngsters instead of well-trained experts. The incidents from Ujjain to Kutch are burning examples of this.
Multinational corporations eager to expand their footprint in India often complain that they don’t get good managers. The youngsters complain they don’t get jobs in the first place. Only quality education can bridge this gap between demand and supply. Unfortunately, that is missing in our country. The posts for teachers in our educational institutes are lying vacant. Even if education is being imparted in certain course, the courses are being run on an ad-hoc basis. Are you surprised when underpaid lecturers — whose job contracts are renewed on an annual basis — sow the seeds of frustration rather than good values in their students? I urge our members of Parliament, which is disrupted on a day-today and session-by-session basis on trivial pretexts, to make sure that they discuss this issue at least once. It is a question of future generations. We cannot keep behaving irresponsibly towards them for too long.
Shashi Shekhar is editorinchief, Hindustan