Indian Education:the need for more choice.

Welcome to India, where cows eat hay and they drive auto rickshaws everyday and everyone is an engineer eh eh. MC Vikram wouldn't really like to have the last phrase in his song I guess, but nonetheless that's the scenario here.

It's like a another caste system. The brilliant kids take up Science and go on to become engineers. Science= engineers.("IIT?" says the aunty next door. "Wonderful!") The mediocre kids take Commerce ("It's so easy!" rave the science kids, well, if it was, why the hell are you not doing it you dumbarse!) and then the leftovers, or the brainless- the arts or the social sciences kids, who, mostly being girls, either end up teaching or, well, married with kids. This will not do, Mr. Sibal, it won't. And to all the education ministers and concerned educationalists, this is for you guys too. We need a more flexible choice. It's high time.

I hate accounts. I just can't take the subject. But, I have no choice. I wanted Mathematics and Economics. The only course that offered these two wants was Commerce, Accounts Math and Economics. What am I supposed to do? "Only two years," my mother said. Two years of doing something you don't like? I'm not a person of dispassionate interests. Hence, my blogging ( or crying out loud) for the need for more choice.

At this point, there is a desperate need for bringing out a more flexible method for offering choices to students. I like Political Sciences, but then, I like Math too. Oh, and I want Economics. Ugh, no honey, you can't study all three of them together, even if you like them. What people don't realise is that subjects of social sciences or commerce are just as important as the science ones. Without any one of them, the society, the economy, the world will not function. You need to know the social effects of everything you do, because at the end of the day, it's US, the people who are going to be effected by anything. In educational systems abroad, there is a mix of subjects from all three categories. This is the sole reason why there many things the Americans and the Europeans are far better than us in many ways. Their freedom of experimentation, use of more practical application, makes them better professionals, any day. Of course, learning by rote has never fetched us anyone, except maybe the title of "teacher's pet" in class. Many educational systems abroad have made it compulsory for students to write atleast one social sciences paper, because, the knowledge of the people is most important.