What is the aim of education in our society?
The 2018 Pratham – Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) highlighted the dismal condition of the Indian Education System: 73% of Class 8 children in India cannot read beyond Class 2 level material, and only 44% of them are able to solve basic arithmetic (EPW Engage).
When research reveals data like that, one does not need to be a scientist to realize that the state of education in India is in dire conditions.
However, today’s post is not about people who have no access to education or those who have but to poor quality of it.
This post is directed at people like you and me, who have access as well as resources to get a quality primary, secondary and higher education.
In 2016, data supplied by UGC India put the number of students in Indian universities and colleges at around 28.5 million students.
I have a simple question for the 28.5 Million students enrolling in these universities each year: What is your purpose for receiving this education?
“To enable me to reach my full potential,” is the ideal answer which most likely nobody will give.
“To enable me to get a good job and earn money,” is much closer to reality.
That is the aim with which a student in India begins his or her education.
I know there is plenty wrong with the Indian Education System, but if you were to give a weightage to each factor and arrange them all in descending order, the top-most item on the list would be the students themselves.
What is the Aim of Education?
In his paper titled “The Purpose of Education”, Randall V. Bass highlights that Schooling and Education are two different things.
Your education is a sum total of everything you have learned up to this point, and it will continue to grow until you die. Schooling is only a small subset of it.
So while school is meant to provide you with knowledge and skills that are already in place, it is by no means the end of your education.
While doing my research, I stumbled upon a College Student Paper by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in which he writes, “It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture.
Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life. Education must also train one for quick, resolute, and effective thinking.”
- The first point is about becoming more efficient. You’ve been told how something is done. Now apply your brain and do it better.
- The second point is about becoming more effective. This means that you should use your knowledge to think of solutions that create more impact than what already exists out there.
The problem with saying, “I want to get educated to get myself a good job and earn money,” is that the principles of becoming more efficient or effective are nowhere to be found.
If your objective is only to earn money, you’re wasting your time and energy with education. You can instead use this time to do what will actually earn you money i.e. Sales & Marketing.
Looking at education as a ladder to reach the other end is a highly inefficient use of it.
Because higher education is meant to give you skills that will help you build your own opportunities. Not an entry ticket to a high-rise building.
In fact, higher education is not a ladder. It is a log of wood from which you can carve out anything you want.
Let’s put that analytical brain of an Indian engineer at work. I like to call this phenomenon Problem Creation at Source (PCS).
You’re doing one of the two things wrong at the onset itself:
- Either your goals are wrong for the path you’re going to take
- Or your path is wrong for the end goal in your mind
The real aim of education is to empower you with knowledge so that you’ll build on it, and then fulfill your goals. It is not to just earn you money or to get you a job.
What an Education System Can and Cannot Teach You
Continuing my point, the education system in India (or almost anywhere else in the world) cannot do much for you except to put everything out there and then expect you to take it. But given the right intent, it does present an opportunity to learn a few valuable things:
- Problem-solving skills – Solving X for Y is not going to take you anywhere. But the framework of converting a problem from subjective to objective, breaking it down into smaller pieces, and then solving for each step to arrive at the final solution, is practically how you’re going to solve any future problem in life.
- The Process of Learning – Learning a new skill can be challenging, especially when you’re on a deadline to complete a task that is crucial for your next promotion. School teaches you the principle of how to learn.
- Feedback and Improvement – Tough tests may haunt you in school and college, but they’re almost kindergarten compared to the challenges in life. When the responsibility of your growth falls on your own shoulders, you learn the importance of regularly evaluating and assessing yourself.
As I always say, analyze and set your objective right about what you want in life, and how to achieve it.
What India needs today is for better-educated people like you and me to use our knowledge and competencies efficiently and effectively.
And after having an experience from the best to the worst, I’m not ready to believe that we cannot do that.
The biggest reform that the Indian Education System needs is in the mindset of students receiving education. To change it, from job-seekers to job-creators.
Please get a good education, because nothing can replace it. But do it with the right intent.
To reiterate, the goal of education is to empower you. And in my opinion, even though the Indian Education System has its flaws at many levels, it has the capability to give you that empowerment.
Again, this is only true for facilities and resources that are already in place for those who have the means to access them. We have a long way to go in providing basic education to those who are bereft of it.
But I wonder, if each of those 28.5 million educated Indians enrolling every year utilized their knowledge to multiply the resources available and create more opportunities, we’d have a very different problem at hand today.
We’d be talking about how there are more jobs than the number of people willing to be hired.
