In recent years, with the onset of India as the global back office there has been a lot of discussions in the living rooms across India talking up the Indian education system and how it gives us a great advantage over fellow Asian or eastern European nations.
Even
Barack Obama, addressing a group of students at a high school in Brooklyn, said
“billions of people from Beijing to Bangalore to Moscow are working every day
to out-educate and out-compete us,” 4 out of 10 scientists at NASA are Indians.
IIT & IIM alumni are not just powering internet giants of the Silicon
Valley but are also corporate high wheelers at the Wall Street.
Enough
reasons to believe our education system is prepping the Indian kids to take on
the world.
But
does the premise hold any water? Is the conclusion even true?
There
are a few independent studies that survey the scholastic performance of eighth
graders or students aged 15 around the world and the results are shocking! In
2003, TIMSS ranked India at 46 among 51 participating countries. A decade later
(coinciding with India’s growth as a global services behemoth), India was
ranked 73 out of 74 countries by PISA. We managed to sneak in ahead of
Kyrgyzstan (yes, it’s a country)!
Studies
and surveys like Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies
(TIMSS), Progress in International Reading Literacy (PIRLS) and Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA) talk about how various countries fare
relatively in terms of learning standards and literacy competency.
It
seems that India did not participate in the PIRLS survey and figured at the
bottom of the results of PISA 2012 and TIMSS 2003, that too when a few states
like Tamil Nadu, Orissa and Himachal Pradesh possibly with some of the highest
literacy rates in the country participated. And this is not the end of it. The
results suggested that only a staggering 17% of the students have such proficiency
in reading so as to be productive in future. And they are only at the baseline
(read, average). Compare this to the whooping 81% of the students around the
world who are much above the baseline. Needless to say, the trend is quite
similar when it comes to mathematical and scientific literacy also.
Critics panned the results terming the
moment as “The end of a beginning”. Unable to contain its shame, the government
finally decided that it wouldn’t participate in such surveys at all.
To be fair though, there
have been certain questions on the veracity and neutrality of these surveys. How
does the organization come at a single rank when different students hailing
from different countries and diverse educational environment, answer different
questions? Switching even a single question around would lead to huge
variations in ranks it would seem. In 2013, the US criticized PISA 2012 saying
that it had made sampling errors by selecting students from the disadvantaged
section to represent the nation. Needless to say, disadvantaged students
perform worse than the rest. Thus speculation persists regarding the
credibility of these results. The fact remains, these surveys are to show the
performance of policies in respective countries through nuanced and in-depth
analysis and mere quantitative ranking is not the end objective.
A
recent documentary – “2 million minutes” (which is roughly the amount of time
that a child spends in high school), however places some faith in the Indian
education system. The documentary showed a comparison between the students of
three major economic frontrunners like India, China and the U.S and how their
study patterns varied and affected their knowledge quotient. American students seemed
to fall behind while Indians lead in terms of Math and science competency.
So
the truth lies somewhere in between. Taking into account both the findings of
the documentary and surveys, done in different occasions based on different
parameters; provides quite a skewed picture. Yet a reform is inevitable but the
govt.’s reaction to the PISA disaster raised too many eyebrows.
As
always, the govt. instead of holding a mirror to itself and trying to make
amends thought it wise to do the ostrich – bury its head and avoid the issue!
This bodes trouble for a country that has a majority of population in the
younger age-groups. The education system of no country is perfect but at least
we as a nation could strive to emulate some positives from the rest of the
nations to ensure we continue to dominate globally because of the system, not
inspite of!