In India, we focus on Right to Education and not Right Education

The growth of any society is strongly inter connected with the quality of education and inclusive developmental measures within the system that can nurture students skills and aptitude for an overall growth. Education is not physics, mathematics or economics alone, indeed it is the moral , social and emotional development of an individual. A tectonic shift of the notion of education from development to ‘insistence’ and ‘coercion’ has definitely ruined the beauty of education that prevailed long before the industrial and information era. The idea of understanding and the process of developing and perceiving the contents taught so as to build an impression from the cemented base of the primitive idea being trained has become a hypothetical and ideal kind of notion when it comes to Indian education system .

In the top education systems in the world , India is nowhere . When countries like Finland and South Korea have been doing consistently and remarkably well ,in our nation we focus more on ‘Right to education’ than ‘Right education’. It is indeed of due concern that we fail to rectify and correct the flaws and loopholes in our education system and instead continue with the same old flawed method without any compunction. Considering the literacy rate on a global scale , India has a literacy rate of 74%, China has a literacy rate of 97% and UK 99%. Moreover, India currently has the largest illiterate population , but these problems have been pertaining since a long time and nothing has changed so far . PISA (program for international student assessment) is a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nations of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading. It was first performed in 2000 and then repeated every three years with a view to improving education policies and outcomes. Indian students were ranked second last (only managing to beat Kyrgystan) in the global test conducted by PISA and the reasons are left unjustified till date.

Building powerful minds can turn out to be an absolute strength of a nation. The pressure students face in our nation (especially 10 and 12 graders) is undeniably disturbing. Students in the classrooms now are more focused on important and sure shot questions and not really keen to know the concept or idea being taught. They have dropped the concept of knowing more and adapted the concept of ‘knowing enough’. A baseless methodology that has been developed with dogmatic stigmas of the societies by accentuating more on marks and grades to evaluate a child has resulted in devastating the curiosity in students and has eventually ruined the fun in learning.

There is a deficit for about 1.25million teachers in India and on the other hand nearly 1 million engineering graduates are unemployed for a significant period of time. This clearly points out how a social dogma has evolved to a vulnerable crisis that can affect the integral sustainment of employment rates and economic growth.

According to the reports from Times of India , in 2006, 5857 students committed suicide across the nation due to exam stress. Suicidal tendencies among students have gone up as they are burdened with greater expectations from parents and coupled with academic pressure. It is desolating to hear news of suicides soon after the CBSE results are out. Sadly , even this year students committed suicide after getting poor results and not satisfying their parents with their grades.

From the noble ‘gurukula’ system we have diverted our concept of education creating inadequacy and infirmity in students which now results in a mislead path towards misfortune. While flipping the pages of newspapers after exam results people only tend to notice the rank holders , innocent students who give up their life after being experimented as ‘guiny pigs’ in the academic trap are being left unnoticed many a times.