The changes we should have made in the Macaulay’s Education System by now
We can see an afterglow of the Macaulay’s Education System even in the following image.
What sort of education system a country has, depends a lot on its past history.
The British people got stuck up to have a dialogue with the natives of the country since we have more than seven hundred different dialects [1] — no other country seems to have.
So the British government gave the task of finding out what best could be done to surmount this problem to Thomas Babington Macaulay, who came up with the idea of making changes at the root level by abolishing the traditional systems of education.
Dissatisfied by the traditional systems of education, he launched a new education system (known as Macaulay’s Education System) in the year 1835, using English as the medium of education instead of Arabic or Sanskrit with an aim of raising a class of people, who would not only serve as interpreters for the British administration — shall also work as clerks for them.
He also evolved a strategy of brainwashing the Indians in a manner that they developed a feeling of being inferior to the British people.
The system launched by him took everyone by surprise as it notched a big success from their point of view.
But it is not known — why it should not have occurred to anyone that if he could have made a revolutionary change in our mindsets that they are a superior race than our race so that we developed an inferiority complex and infused in our mind that we have to get educated only so that we get a lucrative job; we could get over such nostalgia also by giving a facelift to the education system they left behind them for us to follow.
But it is a big surprise that though as many seventy-two years have gone through — our people never thought of re-modelling the education-system anew.
As a result, though no one is aware — be it a bureaucrat, a politician, a policeman, a clerk or whosoever; they seem to have picked up the habit of arm-twisting others to make money, from their ancestors only who had been sucked dry by the government officials during long seven hundred years of slavery — through a change in the DNA.
The memories of the tortures our ancestors may have gone through over the seven hundred years of slavery should have got registered in their DNA — the DNA we all, eventually, inherited from them.
But don’t you think — if the people who were supposed to have redefined our post-freedom education system would have taken care of the changes that should have been made in our Education System, it would have brought our DNA on the track, long back?
The pity is — they did not make any significant change in the education system of the country till date while Macaulay took just one year to introduce his system in the country.
Finding out what is wrong with the present education system
If we compare the Indian education system with the education system of other countries you would find that we give more emphasis on the marks we get in our exams than any other thing. It is believed that if you get more marks, you have performed better.
Look at the mounting pressure on the minds of the children who are preparing for the NEET examination, for instance.
It is so surprising that though we put the students who want to become doctors under so much pressure by burdening them to learn the mountain load of things that only the students who want to make physics as their career should be made to know that many of them may go into pathological depression even before they become eligible to get an entry in a medical college.
Do you think — this system ensures us to pick up only the most meritorious students?
It is not necessary that only the students who secure high marks in the NEET may be the most meritorious.
Nor is it necessary that only the students whose parents may be able to pay the skyrocketing fees of the professional colleges may be more meritorious than the students whose parents are unable to foot so high educational fees.
Look at the atrocious annual fees of some of the medical colleges such as KMC Manipal University of Karnataka which charges fees as high as Rs 3.5 million per annum (beside Boarding Charges and the Incidental Charges) and the fees of the UPCMT Colleges of Uttar Pradesh, which are simply mind-boggling — as high as Rs 4.5 million per annum.
It passes on a message that howsoever brilliant your child may be — it matters a damn.
All that matters is — whether you can afford to pay fees that would give jerks to anybody.
It is a clear indication that if this trend continues — only those who can pay such fees, alone shall be able to become doctors and engineers or any other type of high-quality professionals.
The fate of the Business Schools
Just think — what is taught to us in the business schools?
They teach only how to maximise our profits, notwithstanding by what means — foul means or upright means.
Exactly that explains what is wrong with the present education system.
It is so sad that our books, no more, lay stress on our moral values.
I remember that we used to have a fascinating Hindi book “Our Festivals” in our curriculum of seventh standard in the early forties but, for the reasons best known to only the then educational ministry, even though there was nothing very un-secular about it in the book since even non-Hindu festivals such as Christmas and Eid had been covered in the book — no one knows, why this book should have been withdrawn.
I think this type of book should be reintroduced since these festivals are celebrated with no other purpose than to keep up the kinship among the people around the year.
Beside it, there are many other things we may take care of while refurbishing our education system by taking a tip from the types of queries people raise on the platforms such as Quora.
They would have not been raising such queries if our education system should have allayed the doubts that compel them to post such queries — during the school-days, itself.
The other types of things we should let the people understand during the school-days itself
It is so surprising that though we teach in the schools how we can demonstrate using a prism that sunlight or candle-light consists of as many as seven rainbow colours but do not tell them — how the Nature constructs a rainbow without using any prism though it can be so easily explained to them by including the following experiment also in the curriculum of physics.
It is also noticed that so many people raise such queries as:
(i) Why we don’t have 13 months in the Gregorian calendar since “13 months a year x 4 weeks a month x 7 days a week” makes a calendar year of neat 364 days, which is quite close to 365.24 days — the tropical year consists of?
(ii) Why two adjacent months July and August should have been of 31 days?
(iii) Why the second month should have been the shortest?
(iv) Why should it have been necessary to have made the years divisible by 100 but not by 400 — non-leap years?
Don’t you think — if so many people have such queries in their mind after having spent so many years of their life in the schools and colleges, it speaks ill of the prevalent education system?
It only reflects that something lacks in our education system.
Obviously, it calls for adding a few chapters on such things also in the books of Civics.
What we should include in the curriculum of History
The same is the case with what they teach us in History.
Should we not include the heroic stories of the heroes such as Major Sonam Wangchuk [2], who won the first victory of Indian Army in Kargil without any artillery support, with his team of 30-odd soldiers beside all other heroes of the wars, in the modern history being taught to our children in the schools and colleges?
Though India got its freedom more than seventy years back, we still teach them the History, in which Jalaluddin Akbar is described as “Emperor the Great” as if nobody knows that if any historian of the day would have not described him as “Emperor the Great” he would have been beheaded.
Does it not surprise you that it has not occurred to anybody so far that he was not at all “Anything Great”?
Should we not expose all hideous facts that should have been censored in the past?
Imagine the fate of the country which has lots of meritorious students but it lets them rather languish by making education — out of their reach.
The worst turn the education system has taken is — it has got slipped into the hands of the education-mafias.
The system should ensure that we don’t miss upon the meritorious students just because of their inability to pay off so exorbitant fees which are spiralling upward, day by day.
_think we have failed to have ensured that the Education System should have remained in the hands of philanthropists. It shouldn’t have gone into the the hands of the mafias, after the freedom.
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[2] https://www.thebetterindia.com/62995/kargil-hero-sonam-wangchuk/