Follies of an Archaic Education System
This cartoon has resonated with me for years for its wit, satire, and accuracy. But perhaps Albert Einstein said it better than I ever could “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”.
It requires little justification why this comic has cemented its place in posterity. In fact this comic resonates with how I feel about a mainstream education system that homogenizes its curriculum, while myopically neglecting that every individual possesses a unique set of skills.
Having been raised in India, I witnessed a system that prided itself on the sheer competitiveness and its ability to churn out the best minds. No doubt, the brilliance of those in the system could not be questioned, after all many of these prolific minds rose to the highest echelons in an eclectic mix of industries while many more will continue to do so.
However, the mainstream Indian education system often neglects to introspect if it is using the right tools to judge its participants. A system so resonant of most Asian societies that indulges in exhaustive syllabuses and excessive rote learning that culminates into the final showdown — the competitive exams; that could draw an analogous comparison to modern day gladiator battles, where it’s only the victors who stand tall while the vanquished are allowed to fall.
The biggest litmus test to success in such systems is the sacrosanct sheet of paper called the ‘Report Card’. Such is the level of sacrosanctness that the Report Card, more often than not becomes the sole metric to gauge the level of progression to the next stage.
But if you ask me, the only thing that the Report Card truthfully states is your full name (hopefully without that god awful occasional misprint). It doesn’t reflect your potential, show your aptitude, doesn’t highlight your skill sets. What it subtly highlights is how much you have been intimidated by the system to conform to the standards expected.
Now I am not an education reformer, nor am I advocating for the education system to be completely overhauled. But it definitely needs a facelift.
Some in defense of the education system would accurately point to the voluminous intake of students every year and the inability of an education system to individually tailor its curriculum to benefit the needs of millions of individuals. Fair enough! But that being said, there is an insidious danger creeping up.
Having a single layer homogenized curriculum may be an even playing field that comes in the ruse of a uniform unbiased metric, but the bigger myopia here is best accentuated in the comic. By virtue of an uniform test of climbing the tree, the monkey wins hands down. And currently that’s where the system is headed. One where it is easy ‘ape’ what is required to get ahead.
The biggest point I often lament about is an ideological one. In a curriculum designed for the purpose to ace examinations, the knowledge factor is often compromised. That is learning for the pure sake of learning is hardly emphasized let alone inculcated. Curious minds are substituted with more rote leaning minds. More often than not, the importance is devoted to only studying the relevant chapters that is immediately relevant to excel in the forthcoming test. The concept of knowledge has gone awry from the purest intellectual sense. It’s no wonder that current Member of Parliament and former UN Under Secretary General, Shashi Tharoor once said “knowledge is the information that is retained after one has given an examination”.
But I think the best analogy I have heard came from a family friend who quit his C-suite level job at a Fortune 500 company and devoted his time to teaching Math and Science to high school kids. On being asked why he had taken such a brazen decision, he replied, “no matter where you finish in the rat race, at the end of the day you find you’re still a rat. So I was done being a rat”.
Profound epiphany indeed! Perhaps it’s time to change the education race and vstop being rats, rote learning parrots or even ‘monkeys’ for that matter!
