Do you have similar questions on our present education system?

Having been inclined towards teaching form a very early age, I have only known one thing learn, write, attend exams, get good marks and move to the next level. In life, everything looks strange/ funny in retrospect. But this idea which has been stuck in my mind from the age of 11 had existed in some form or the other. Not the idea of revolutionizing education but that the Education of some sort should be a birth right. However, education system of the present form is very contentious at varied levels but it might be the best thing for a lot of people who have just been able to make a living through something or the other they have learnt.  

As I look up my family tree most of the people in my family are teachers, including my mom and sister (at one point even my dad was teaching in a school and would help in private tuition my mom used to conduct at home). It’s fair to say that most of my childhood revolved around education and schools. In the past few years listening to people who have become mentors and a few virtual mentors through youtube, I have come to think of education at a much deeper level. At the heart of all this are very important questions;

1. Why are degrees losing their value? 23 lakh apply for 368 peon posts in Uttar Pradesh, India

2. Why should education be so linear? 

3. Why aren’t we focusing on mastery?    Let's teach for mastery — not test scores

4. Why aren’t we taught about some essential things in life?    Teach every child about food | Jamie Oliver

5. Is the education system killing creativity and does it fail to cherish diversity? Do schools kill creativity?

6. Are we creating psuedo-passion in young minds? And is peer pressure and social norm causing a brain drain?

There is much to ponder and our time is running out. Either we can keep complaining or do something about it. Where do you stand? 

How can we make education available to everyone, simultaneously can we help children and young adults identify their life's calling? At the same time using the robust models of the colonial education system which has stood the test of time?

Ephemeral nature of the human condition

Fast forward to 3016 that is a 1000 years from now, none of us will live to see that year in soul, why go that far; except a handful, we will not even see 2116. Forget about being alive, will people living at that time remember you or me? Does it even matter if we are being remembered or not? This ephemeral nature of our existence should not demotivate us but should ignite us to follow our heart as Steve Jobs said, 

“You Are Already Naked. There Is No Reason Not To Follow Your Heart.”

It doesn't matter what you and I do individually to help the earth to become more sustainable, it isn't going to be enough for our generation to help the future of our race, a global village to exist and become higher beings. More outgoing, more intelligent, more conscious, and more human! 

To understand how much we, this generation, the people of the 21st century will affect the life of the people in the 31st century; we have to look at how things were evolving in the 11th century. We as a generation are influencing and will influence how people think 1000 years later whether our future earthlings like it or not.

So, it is left to us to either INSPIRE and catapult our civilization into the next few millennia and be remembered as the first generation which worked together to create a much better world which a few individuals could not have done. Or just be remember as a generation when Elon Musk landed people on Mars. I am not saying Elon should not be credited, I am saying if all of us are inspired like Elon, our generation would have an impact which the human race could never have imagined.

How did we get to rule the world? Have we let dollar centric policies rule us too long?

The truth about economic growth has been right in front of us and it has been in the public domain for years now. Economic growth is just a means to achieve the ultimate goal of human development, nothing more than that (Human development report 1996. Published for the United Nations development program (UNDP)). Report after report every single year, tries to point out facts that the world’s affinity towards economic development does not effectively translate to better quality of life. I am not going to make the same mistake of pulling out 100s of pages of documents with statistics and interpretations by economic pundits. As a matter of fact, I have to accept I don’t have a clear understanding of the extensive documents published each year and I rely on interpretations by the pundits. Something is evident from every single report/ interpretation; at least the developed countries would have fared much better on human development if the current model of economic growth was efficiently impacting people’s lives. I would like to take a few steps back and ponder upon the historical significance of economic growth and the evolution of our race.

The basic problem with us human beings is that, we haven’t really understood our true strengths and weaknesses. Probably, a SWOT analysis for us might help better understand what might be good for us as a race rather than blindly running behind numbers and projections of economic growth. I would like to point out one or two significant factors in each column; STRENGTHS: knowledge (perceived as intelligence over other species) and diversity in our thought process/ interpretations of a problem at hand, WEAKNESSES: differences based on caste, religion, colour and spoiled competition (where everyone wants to win at the cost of someone rather than thinking of a win-win), OPPORTUNITIES: Educate everyone (not focussed on getting a degree which doesn’t mean anything to anyone) knowledge and skill based education, THREATS: $$$$$ (Money).

Mahatma Gandhi once said, "The earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not every man's greed." Let me elaborate more on the threats and weaknesses, we are easily lured by the wealth earth has to offer us, we had created divisions early in our evolution to protect the resources we had and those divisions have taken a very ugly shape in today’s world and leads to discrimination and disparity. We can observe this divisive guarding of ones territories to safe-guard self and resources even today among our primate ancestors and other animal species. So, it’s natural that we did that hundreds of thousands of years ago but, can’t we do much better than our Stone Age ancestors? “The grass is greener on the other side of the fence.” Today let’s give this phrase a different interpretation; many rich countries have good reserves of fossil fuel but they still tend to look out for reserves which are out of their territories to exploit. Fossil fuel is just one example and many other natural resources are getting added to this list as we chase better economic growth. In a way, our threats and weakness are interlinked. As centuries rolled on, our obsession towards something which had most value around the given time has determined the fate of millions of people. No one really cared much about fossil fuel until the industrial age and that was the fate of precious metals and stones, iron, livestock, crops, and similarly, things which are spurring economic growth now will also become irrelevant.

“Necessity is the mother of invention.” This is a well-known phrase, but how much do we really understand this? There are so many things which we take for granted today like shelter, food and even heat/fire; these were commodities 100s of thousands of people died for through the ages. We don’t know for certain how fire was discovered, but when that first moment of making fire happened, they would have seen something supernatural in that blaze. As years past, our basic needs became more sophisticated; we forgot about our real strength, our collective knowledge as a race which had put us on top of the food chain and started to create economic and social barriers. We have achieved so much success as an organism, learning, building over existing knowledge and discovering or inventing things faster than one could dream. A simple example of the cosmic time scale which scientists give regarding human evolution popularized by Carl Sagan can help understand the enormity of our accomplishments, if the earth was created at the stroke of mid night on new year’s day and if now is the eve of the next year, known human history started only about 15 seconds ago; whereas mammals would have existed for just 5 days now. Imagine if we were like our mammalian ancestors without human intellect, we would still be running around hunting animals in the forest. On the contrary, picture a world where everyone among the 7+ billion people can contribute to our growth and development, compared to a few million who are able to do it now; how surreal that development of our race will be? Most of the others, are left out due to lack of education and worse case lack of food, dire poverty and senseless wars. To add on to these issues, we also have discrimination based on gender in education, jobs and wages which is more common than what we think of.  

Education has evolved over the years as any other activity of human interaction. From the time when education was just for the elite to a time where internet connectivity is bringing knowledge to our footsteps irrespective of who we are. Yes, we can argue that now everything is online and there is no problem, everyone can find things to learn. Sadly, that’s not the case; the aristocracy has been replaced by money/ability to purchase knowledge. There are still a lot of things which we cannot learn from the internet. Take for example learning to swim. Yes you watch a video on YouTube, taking it for granted that we have a swimming pool which probably isn’t a case in most developing countries; how do you exactly learn? You cannot know how your hands and legs are moving under water unless someone tells you that you are making a mistake; I am not going to talk about special cases of people like Julius Yego who won gold in world athletics championships in javelin just by watching videos online.

Internet based education is a start which has opened the doors for many knowledge untouchables, but it should never become an excuse because classroom based teaching can never be replaced. If online teaching was working efficiently, all the leading universities would have moved online but that’s not the case. Developing countries don’t seem to invest much on education comparable to their respective GDP which is evident from world banks data on education specific country’s expenditure. More importantly in many developing and underdeveloped countries, the money allocated might not really reach the grass roots due to the high levels of corruption prevailing in the political system. Many developing countries have allowed private enterprises to enter education sector; the private sectors did a great job may be 100 years ago in education, but today even the so called respectable non-profit educational private sector is opening doors only for the economically elite (there are always exceptions). This idea of investing on knowledge training is not new, it stems from the old saying, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”  But there are serious constrains at our hands as well, how can we even teach anyone who is starving? Will we give the children who are starving, fish to eat now or teach them to fish? It is a complex question but the only solution which looks plausible is to increase funds for education. The funding for education must also be complimented with creating social awareness among the masses about education and how it can change the future of their children.  

We as a race need to get our priorities right; we need to make a choice about our survival as a race, are we going to follow a ill equipped economic growth which does not translate, or are we going to make sure our race stands the test of time? Knowledge based education is the only way out of this awkward dollar centric economic growth. As William Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI part 2 act 4 scene 7, “..ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven,..” As of now, we are making a lot of people on this planet, our fellow earthlings feel, they are cursed by God. Hopefully, we can change this in our life time and make the world a better place for our future generations to further prosper as a one world civilization.

We are young, we learn by screwing up in everything!

Our generation is becoming the biggest screw ups in human history. We set targets, we dream bigger than reality; in the process loose our brains and get sucked into ourselves. Oh wait, how much brain do we actually have? Yes we all probably have the same amount of brain and intellect the previous generation had, but we live such a fast life that we lose focus; we want to do and want to be good at everything. Can we be good at everything? It’s Mission impossible! Unless we are Tom cruise hanging on to a plane while it really takes off, but even these perfectly heroic characters are not a pro in everything. They definitely screw up in something, otherwise we won't have a movie to watch. Whereas we the non-fictional superheroes of our own lives, dream of accomplishing everything. We have heard so many times that we unconsciously influence our mind through what we see, read and hear.

The digital age is imposing on us tons of videos which show people doing amazing things, that’s great. We should appreciate what these seemingly normal humans do. But what we forget is, we influence our brains that we can also do the same things. Not just imbibing one but trying to do all of them. We humans do compare ourselves with others and this hasn’t been a recent phenomenon. During the absence of digital knowledge, the comparison was only with our neighbors and friends; but now with the whole world! People start professing things about happy life, happy working, happy mind and all those (of course I do as well) but we fail to realize that it’s about some sample subjects somewhere on the planet. We considering ourselves special counter-intuitively should avoid us from falling a prey to generalized ideals and opinions. But we don’t, we think that’s the norm and I should try those things. We try one guidebook/ guide blog at a time and figure out nothing works.

The process of rediscovering oneself can be guided but ideas from around us though books or any other form. But letting us rely completely on one set of principle is like looking at a fish in the ocean and thinking all the fishes do and look exactly the same. The smart world brings in a lot of smart and ‘making us less-smart’ things to the doorsteps of our minds. Be it ‘--- got talent’ shows, ‘Guinness world record’, ‘perfect couple’, ‘survival stunts’, etc; we just can’t do everything; less so being good at them.

There is an amazing list of talks on Ted called, “What is success?” . Especially the one by Alain de Botton  called "A kinder, gentler philosophy of success". We cannot achieve everything; if you want a good relationship may be we need to sacrifice some of our workout time. If we want to achieve something in work, we might have to give up on some time with family. There is always a sacrifice, which we choose to blind fold ourselves from when looking at people who achieved greatness and we just admire the perfection in them. Only when we start to admire successful people along with their imperfections, with their greater sacrifices; we will be able to be happy with our lives and strive for a better life rather than a perfect life. May be this idea will someday reduce the dissatisfaction in our generation and help in improving the quality of our lives. 

Probably sooner the better!

Sometimes it feels like, fighting a loosing battle!

• • Being an avid researcher, I always push myself to think counterintuitively. In this case, why is research integrity important? What if there was no integrity in research? A few thousands might die because of medicines which should have saved them, 1000s more may die due to building and bridge collapses, millions may starve due to failed harvest cultivating crops which claimed overproduction, maybe we might have more fireworks in the sky when satellites are launched or we might have all been dead and gone.
    
    

    Importance of standards:

    We always give excuses for not being up to the mark. But who sets these marks? Should we actually even compromise perfection? We as a race have understood from our experiences over the centuries that efficiency is as important as perfection. So we set standards, to bring about this balance. We allow error bars and we empathize with experimental and human errors and try to accommodate them, see the significance of the outcome rather than a black and white approach.
    
    

    Rat race and instant gratification:

    “I need to report to my boss by tonight. So, I don't care about the pH being 7.6 instead of 7.5. All he needs is data which we can add in that paper.” This is just the tip of the iceberg, we know too well that the system we are in today which is based on impact factors and publish or perish culture, is the root cause. We have run too far with it as a community to even turn back and introspect. We think it is the norm, we breathe it, we believe it and we live it. We want every single experiment to be a part of a research article which will be published in a high impact factor paper. So what happens, we go a step further.
    
    

    Breaching the boundaries:

    When a meeting is set for 8 am we sometimes tend to think 10 minutes past 8 am is also ok. Our day to day approaches like this, pushes us to overrule the standards assuming time intervals in readings are ok, removing outliers are not bad and may be just decreasing the control value a bit to reach the magical p < 0.05 is acceptable. By doing this, we ignore the gravity of the effect it is going to have on the world.

    
    

    There are more than a few reasons why integrity is important;

    
    

    •   Most of the research is done using the hard earned tax money of the general public.
    •   The researchers are most of the time paid for all the work they perform, unlike the days when
      scientist worked part time at odd hours to support the research they were doing.
    •   More importantly, the basis of any project is to strive for a better human existence, if the
      research we do is not going to accomplish this due to its falseness; ARE WE DOING JUSTICE TO EVEN OUR OWN CONSCIENCE? 

The failure of decades of misplaced priorities and the determined few; can they change this world?

History has taught the human race that failures are not just lessons for one person or a generation but for everyone across generations. We seldom learn, seldom choose to learn and fail to learn from our failures as a race. The wars of ancient Greece till the wars of this day all portray one appalling human quality, greed. However hard we try to flush it out of the human memory; it rejuvenates in a new form. The truth is; we always look for more returns, more money, more land, more food and more of whatever is known to us. Smart phones and tablets share the same features from hardware to software (with minor variations) but we want them both, when we already have sleek portable laptops. If you ask young ignited minds their thoughts about a better planet; we are always assertive. We aim and dream to leave behind a better planet, but only through the means which will make us prosperous rising above the populations. We have come too far forgetting what got us where we are! We cannot achieve our goal of leaving behind a better planet by revolutions in information technology or in politics or innovative business models or anything which is materialistic; but only through leaving behind a legacy which creates more ignited young minds, only through efficiently passing the knowledge we gained to our next generation . When all the brilliance of the young minds are lost to the commercialization of this planet, how can we claim to have successfully passed the baton to the future generations? When we complain about brain drain, shouldn't we think about ways to stop it draining out of the entire education system? We as a generation have forgotten about this big responsibility of becoming and grooming educators.

Shortsightedness of our long term plans of a confused generation!

7 years ago in March 20^th 2007 final day of our public exams the last day of high school. “Machi (the way of calling dude in Tamil Nadu), all the formalities done now where do you see yourself in 5 years?” asked one of my friends Krishna Prasad standing outside the school gates. We were all like ok that's not the best question when you had just finished one of the craziest exam series which will literally change our lives. (At least that's what we thought at that age.) We were all like this and that bla bla bla going around the group.  Reality strikes harder than a fabulous exam results and it struck our lives in 3 months and most of our futures changed.

2 years into college and we had the same question and the weird guy to ask the weird question this time was me. Talking about the future is always exciting even though we might be the dumbest person in the group. Everyone was like again bla bla bla bla again. It all looked so cool that day not realizing what exactly we were talking about.

Our life’s choices become drastically different influenced by the circumstances of the day, to state the least daunting pressure on the choices we make. Everyone’s perception of life changes as we grow we all wanted to be pilots one day, then astronomers, may be a social activist, then a crazy scientist, a teacher may be, the list goes on as we get influenced by the amazing people we experience in our day to day lives to the people who motivate us through the news we hear. But where did things go wrong? Why suddenly every one of us just started working in the IT/services industry (at least in Madras and in India) and whatever the local influence was. Yes, it is intelligent to adapt to the demands of today but are we missing the point?

Weren’t we fighters? Aren’t we explorers? We always talked about fighting to figure out our lives and not taking no for an answer. Will this generation be content with the choices we are making with our lives? This doesn’t end there and that's the worst part of the problem. Some of us follow our dreams, break away from the system and explore. When I went back to research after working in IBM for a year my parents asked me what you are going to do, I told them a PhD, a postdoc and then become a professor one day with so much confidence. It all began there…..

We all see successful people like Professors and Scientist being a Graduate Student and we walk like zombies just following the trail. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. This is the only thing which runs through our heads as a grad student. (If you are not a Grad student and if you thought we think about amazing experiments all the time no you got us completely wrong) Education was to help us explore the world, to apply our knowledge to try and make it a better place; just think about it. 

The first answer which comes of a student these days on the very first day of school about a question of life after graduation is, “I want to get a decent job with a decent salary.” Then the other answers starts to come like, “Want to find a nice life partner.”  Bla bla bla.. but most of the time we don't get to hear something like, “I am going to put the knowledge I gained to help solve the problems in my community.” The closed we get is like, “I am going to cure cancer or AIDS.”, if we are Bio students.

Looking for a well-paid job, a life partner, curing cancer, etc. are all ok but shouldn't this be an offshoot of a much more primary goal of figuring out what we what to do in life to put it more bluntly, FINDING OUT THE REASON FOR OUR EXISTENCE. Shouldn't we be following our heart rather than just going into a degrees with pre-set goals and just becoming a prey to our goals. We always complain that we don't have the freedom to choose what we want to do in life due to family pressure but are we still making the choice we really want even if we manage to break away from the system? Are we just too short sighted just flowing successful people rather than trying to be successful ourselves in our own ways. 

Success is always very subjective word. If we are satisfied by the choices we made all though our lives and die as a content person, we will be the most successful people ever to walk on the face of the earth. Will this generation be successful or regret the lives we lived?