Challenges Faced By Indias Education System Education Essay

Just Imagine. A world where every kid participates on a level education system, challenging themselves and others, and achieving rewards and prizes for applying themselves, no matter what their social, economic, or geographic disposition. Every man is but the product of his beliefs, and what he thinks, he becomes. It is believed that India is uniquely positioned to achieve a significant competitive advantage in the world economy by being among the first to implement a flat education system for its entire people before the end of the next decade. This goal can be accomplished by partnering with technology to develop a complete free open source education solution for its people and peoples of the world. For over 3000 years the “sage on a stage” most instructional approach has dominated human culture and education models. [1] Education is now emerging as schools, teachers and students have begun to utilize technology, open to all approach in education. Today technology can play a intense role in creating a education system converge to unite disparate and disconnected education systems into a single global learning platform.

India’s education system is facing challenges that may be one of the biggest facing any nation in the 21st Century. Faced with the fastest population growth and poor technical infrastructure in rural regions, India must find a cost effective solution for educating its people. [2] The traditional education solution isn’t going to be adequate to overcome the educational challenges it is facing. Under that model, India would need to build new schools, train and retain teachers, buy books and collateral supplies, keep these materials current and put in place more bureaucracy that leads to ever escalating costs at the sacrifice to education. Therefore, a technological solution for it s entire people needs to be identified, actualized and implemented. And most importantly how can we do it for less than it is currently costing India?

The Real Challenges

Today, India’s education system is designed to overload the pupils with too much ‘knowledge’ or theory and the focus is to enable them to improve their memory skills rather than enabling them to be innovative/creative/practical. [3] 

The current system is designed to create a hierarchical society, with only a small section scoring very high marks; the remainder gets fed up with the monotonous and irrelevant education system, forcing them to discontinue their studies.

India has made giant leaps in the field of telecommunication and technology. There is hardly any village in India which is left out from this excitement. This technology has not touched the education system to provide ‘remote teaching’ facilities or online knowledge sharing.

The urban sectors are more concentrated on, whereas technology can touch lives and enable education across the rural sectors as well.

The cultural differences between the urban and rural sections of people in India; this creates barriers for people in the rural sector, who are more docile in nature and it takes great efforts for them to open up, answering in class, or making their ideas heard

The access to uniform teaching content, especially video and multi-media.

content will enable removal of disparities. This will neutralize the ill effects of absentee teachers .

Limited access to technology, where only a few can afford.

Other Challenges

Despite efforts to incorporate all sections of the population into the Indian education system, through mechanisms such as positive discrimination and non-formal education,large numbers of young people are still without schooling. Although enrolment in primary education has increased, it is estimated that at least 35 million, and possibly as many as 60 million, children aged 6-14 years are not in school. Severe gender, regional,and caste disparities also exist. The main problems are the high drop-out rate, especially after Class 10, low levels of learning and achievement, inadequate school infrastructure, poorly functioning schools, high teacher absenteeism, the large number of teacher vacancies, poor quality of education and inadequate funds. Other groups of children â€-at risk’, such as orphans, child-laborers, street children and victims of riots and natural disasters, do not necessarily have access to schools.

No Common School System

Furthermore, there is no common school system; instead children are channeled into private, government-aided and government schools on the basis of ability to pay and social class. [4] At the top end are English-language schools affiliated to the upscale CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education), CISCE (Council for the Indian Schools Certificates Examination) and IB (International Baccalaureate) examination boards, offering globally recognized syllabuses and curricula. Those who cannot afford private schooling attend English-language government-aided schools, affiliated to state-level examination boards. And on the bottom rung is poorly managed government or municipal schools, which cater for the children of the poor majority. Therefore, while education for all is safeguarded by the Constitution, and a majority of people can now access educational resources, the quality of the education that young people in Indian receive varies widely according to their means and background.

Education for all -The Advantages

Technology and Learning when together will majorly help improve many of the problems facing India by creating a complete education system -for every student, young or old, rich or poor, urban or rural.

Technology and Learning can enable education that is not anymore limited to a particular region or age group. It will be learning anything, anytime, and anywhere from multiple authorities from the comfort of your home, village, town, city from any web-enabled device.

It will be about playing exciting e-games that emphasize the topics key points you just watched or listened too.

It will be about students being able to earn and spend reward points for achieving goals and milestones, or completing assignments and connecting with others in virtual classrooms.

It will lend a helping hand in the process of identification of brilliant global students living in villages of India, based on their ability to interact within an intelligent e-learning environment. [5] 

There will be new roles for schools – it can mean the end of thoughtless evaluation tests, grades and abusive certificates. Educational institutions, schools, colleges that will become the heaven for networking, knowledge application and mentoring.

There will be shift in learning, so will there be a change in the way schools and colleges operate.

Our teachers will become more focused on teaching problem solving techniques, critical thinking skills and social and interpersonal skills.

Teachers will no longer need to be experts in subject areas. Instead experts will be delivering their thought and ideas directly to the students.

Teachers will become more like mentors and guidance counselors to their students and as a result India will be able to train more teachers faster, and retain them, helping to increase the teacher to student ratio in classes.

It will then become easy to create and deliver a complete open course-ware online education media solution to any web enabled device.

It will provide tremendous efficiencies by allowing a global community of enthusiasts, teachers and practitioners to develop open course ware.

It will eliminate the need to repeatedly create lesson plans, and local and regional control of educational content will become a thing of the past.

Just as communities of writers sort out topics on Wikipedia a community of global educators will sort out the order in which learning should progress for every subject.

There will be more avenues available to more people on job training and professional training programs that traditionally were limited to specialized organizations.

Some facts about Learning & Technology:

Learning is a deeply personal act that is facilitated when learning experiences are relevant, reliable, and engaging. During those early days of e-learning, we learned the hard way that simply building a learning system that could be accessed over the Internet did not guarantee that people would have much need for, or interest in, the courses and programs, regardless of the provider. [6] We learned that shoveling courseware online did not provide anyone faculty, students, or administrators with an online experience that was much more than tedious electronic page-turning. Sometimes we learned the hard way that doing learning unto othersâ€- could quickly de-motivate and disengage the very people we had hoped to serve. Different kinds of learning demand appropriate strategies, tools, and resources. Concrete operational learning can be facilitated using representational media, whereas teaching complex problem-solving such as performing surgery or landing an airplane may be far better served by allowing learners to practice developing those skills in a safe, risk-free virtual environment. Having just-in-time access to information, even in a flat-file, text-based form, may be far preferable to having no access to any information at all. Questions about media appropriateness from a pure cognitive perspective are likely to be mitigated by aesthetic and experience quality metrics.

More than 20 years of empirical evidence underscores that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-allâ€- technology solution for learning.

Therefore, technology engages learners by structuring and organizing information, by displaying and demonstrating procedures and operations. It can help make a learning experience more memorable and can help relate new information to that which is already known. [7] Therefore, technology can help strengthen learner motivation, focus attention, make a learning moment more memorable, or demonstrate the relevancy of learning to performance; the greater is the likelihood that technology will have a direct positive effect on learning.

Impact On Indian Armed Forces

These suggested methods will bring in quality manpower to perform stress full duties and technologically oriented manpower to deal with future cahllenges.Indian education if improved from grass root level will greatly benefit the way we need to train manpower. It will also help us reduce the training time and better absorption of modern weapons.

Sometimes deployed armed forces personnel wish to further their education, or choose to have a different choice of career after their duty ends. A perfect way for them to achieve this target is through an distance learning program. This will be beneficial in the sense that they would be on duty and can pursue their education without having to attend regular college classes.Growing choices of colledges foe young kids gives them and helps armed force personnel to pursue higher studies which in long run benefits services.

Military proper education and training is a process which intends to establish and improve the capabilities of military personnel in their respective roles. Military education can be voluntary or compulsory duty. Before any person gets authorization to operate technical equipment or be on the battle field, they must take a medical and often a physical test. The primary training is recruit training. Recruit training attempts to teach the basic information and training in techniques necessary to be an effective service member. After finishing basic training, many service members undergo advanced training more in line with their chosen or assigned specialties. This range from training to studies of weapons. In advanced training, military technology and equipment is often taught. Many large countries have several military academies, one for each branch of the service, that offer college degrees in a variety of subjects, similar to other colleges. However, academy graduates usually rank as officers, and as such have many options besides civilian work in their major subject. This in short describes the inservice training imparted to all ranks in armed forces. The above mentioned cycle can be shortened or efficiency improved if proper education is provided to all personnel.