Why do you send your children to school? Why do you want to teach them? Passing through Karnprayag and Rudraprayag, when I went to Surguja and Jashpur Nagar in eastern Chhattisgarh, and Chamarajanagar in southern Karnataka and asked these questions to common people, I found similar answers in all villages and small towns. And these answers have been given like this for years, with three parts. First, without education today there can be no prestige. Second, education is essential to live in the modern world and third, education is essential for good employment. These expectations of the common man are also directly related to the aims of education and our curriculum goals. However, the truth is that as much as our education system is failing to develop basic understanding in children, it has been equally incapable of fulfilling its other goals.
This weakness of the education system is increasing the rate of under-employment or unemployment among the youth. Of course, one of the reasons for this is not creation of sufficient number of jobs and new livelihood opportunities, but our school and higher education system cannot turn its back on its participation in this.
The fundamental failures of quality and equity in the education system have a profound and widespread impact on everything, including access to jobs and employment. But the two aspects related to it are directly ineffective on the issues of employment and livelihood. The first is that, as in most parts of our society, education is also anchored in the belief that our supreme ability is to ‘manage the mind’. It does not give much importance to the feeling of ‘haath chale’ (to work). This is confirmed not only by the fact that vocational education is considered inferior to academic education, but also the importance of ‘working’ is not given much importance in academic education. In evaluation tasks, ridiculously little weight is given to ‘practical’. Even in engineering colleges, the emphasis is on writing and sitting rather than practicing.
The flip side is little or no attention to the development of that ability, which is commonly referred to as a ‘skill’. Skill is actually the ability to do a variety of tasks (which are related to people, communication and many other things) with one’s own hands. These have many implications. Firstly, it creates an artificial separation between knowledge and skill. Whereas in reality ‘what to know’ and ‘how to know’ are inextricably linked. To be effective, the mind (and heart too) and hands have to work together. Another implication is the distance between vocational and academic education. The gap between the two has deepened over the past few decades, as a complete ‘skill training’ system has emerged. Clearly, we have created two underdeveloped and inadequate mechanisms. One, we have an academic education system that ignores ‘how to learn’. And second, there is the skill training and vocational education system, which has remained shallow in the absence of ‘what to know’. In the process, we have also significantly strengthened social stigma and widened the disparities between those with access to academic education and those forced into vocational education and skill training.
However, there are still some glimmers of hope. We will be able to solve many such issues when we implement the National Education Policy 2020. First of all, this policy gives equal importance to ‘playing the mind’ and ‘running hands’ in the educational values and understands that ‘how to know’ and ‘what to know’ cannot be separated. Secondly, the new education policy eliminates the distinction between academic education, vocational education and skill training. Thirdly, there are many minor issues involved in this. As such, it takes care that all children get vocational education, which will certainly help break down the hierarchy between ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’. It has also been ensured that vocational education and skill training should be made part of the curriculum of most reputed higher educational institutions. The pedagogical approach of linking materials from all the subjects being learned in the surrounding world will also have a profound impact on the student. Apart from this, many other good things are also part of the new National Education Policy.
Addressing the loopholes in the system will bring forth people who have the ability to adapt children to work in the school itself and to prepare them for the rapidly changing labor markets. However, this is only one aspect of the whole issue. Another big part of this is ensuring that our economy generates a sufficient number of good jobs. Undoubtedly, this needs to prioritize the creation of good jobs, as a better education system (with ‘how to’ and ‘what to know’ as our guide) alone cannot provide long-term economic benefits to the youth on its own.
Clearly, there is an urgent need for a national strategy for job creation, which not only takes into account the reality of our country, but also gives importance to global economic and technological changes. Good education may be an essential condition for economic growth (good and progressive jobs), but it is not the only condition.
(These are the author’s own views)