Growing Rich Everyday... My Weblog

Taare Zameen Par is about a dyslexic kid, Ishaan Awasthi, who is unable to comprehend the rigors of a typical formal Indian education system that is so mindless and abnormal quite so often. However, instead of correcting itself to be able to adapt to the poor kid, all the participants [teachers, parents and the like] in the system deem the kid to be abnormal, making his life nothing less than miserable.

Everyone can relate to it, especially if you have grown up in India where most children are labeled as worthless if they "can't" become engineers , doctors or MBAs. Even this I do not blame much, because if one were to see the other side of the coin , it is precisely these professions that has helped India as a nation to accelerate its economic growth during the last decade. Science and technology are usually the tickets for a "developing" nation to propel their growth and stand up in the face of global competition. Even within a nation, it is the ticket for the lower and middle classes to climb up to the next level in the class ladder, because the next levels always represent more economic prosperity. Indulging in creativity, arts and humanities can usually be a privilege of the more wealthier classes and nations.

But what initiates the most angst is, it is even this making of "good" engineers and doctors is what the system cannot get right. What good creativity and innovative thinking can a system achieve that promotes an extensive amount of "rote" learning. It is simply churning mindless graduates based on lame exams wherein "rote" answers are the only ones accepted to the questions asked. Forget creating something, it even nips an average thought process, rendering the brain dyslexic even if it wasn't to start with.

I copy my sister's views here :) - Education does not mean scoring high marks good numbers high elite degrees in exams and certificates. Life is an exam where the syllabus is not defined and there are no pre-known question papers nor there are any most likely questions.Instead there are challenges , questions coming from all directions.
What matters most is the confidence within us which needs to be persistent in cuting the challenges like a sharf knife :) !!

There was an article in The New York times about the Japanese envying India's schools. It mentions that Japanese are amazed with the way Indian schools teach counting at the age of 2 yrs, computers at the age of 3-5 yrs etc. Why, why , oh why? What in the whole world is going to collapse if the 2-year old toddler doesn't know the numbers? That is an age where children ought to be doing nothing but playing, and not be pressured to learn such stuff at all.

Sigh !! :(