My niece, an absolutely brilliant child, a topper throughout her schooling, an avid reader, winner of numerous prizes in school and inter-school debate competitions, a child who every one in the family is so proud of and a dream child God has bestowed in our family. Why am I writing her intro? Today she is broken, lying in her room, crying all day. It's not that she has not done good in her class 12th board exams. She has scored a cool 95.2% (without sweating a minute for it). But besides that she had put her soul in that dreaded entrance exam called JEE Advanced, which she suspects she has blown off. I'm not surprised at all at her under performance. It is not that I had doubts on her capability. Bu I had seen her in the run-up to the exam. She was a pale shadow of her chirpy self, her self confidence had all gone and she was moving around like a scurried lamb as if her whole life depended on what she does in those 6 hours. So much of anxiety, so much uncertainty in the lives of these in whose hands rest the future of this country? If such brilliant outstanding students of ours feel so much uncertainty for their future what about millions and millions of those who are much below the top of the pyramid?
And then I remembered this article which I wrote in my IIT-Bombay room 3 years back.. Re-posting it today.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ok, let me put the disclaimer
right in the beginning. This article is NOT about contributions of IITs to
society at large and their collective failure in developing a single break
through technology which can be called world class and can be attributed solely
to IITs. Well, these definitely are the
colossal failures indeed, but we will focus on something else here. My basic
contention is this article is that IITs actually have an overall negative
impact on our society despite them themselves being a mediocre institute with
almost no break through technology to their credit. So is it worth it? Are they worth the eulogy that they command
given their mediocre technical contributions and colossal but negative social contributions?
IITs first and only claim to fame
is that a huge number of students compete for handful of seats offered by them.
Lets analyze the impact of this:
So among all the people who compete in IIT
entrance exam, approximately 99% are rejected. So naturally these 1% people who
succeed get infected with a great sense of achievement and pride and of course
a sense of superiority over their peers. It’s a different matter altogether,
however that the people who actually succeed were helped a great deal from five
star coaching centers who siphon off a large amount of money in liu of that
success. So success in this test, in large number of cases is not natural but
practiced, practiced in a particular manner which masters the trick of trade to
gain admission. Of course, it’s not my
case that everybody who qualifies for IIT
fall in this basket but truth is this route is more norm then exception. So
quality of people who actually enter IIT
varies a lot and unlike socially accepted norm, admission to IIT is no guarantee to natural genius ness.
Ok, but that aside, the bigger
negative impact of IITs come from the feeling of failure and rejection that
grip a large number of talented people. Most of these people who don’t make it,
accept their defeat in this battle of mind and accept their status of a second
class citizen in the world of technocrats. Having accepted that, a large number
of them then choose the path of mediocrity and pursuit of excellence is given a
quite burial. Here again, I’m not talking about exceptions but this behavior is
more norm. So IITs first contribution to the society comes in the form of
decimating the self confidence of a large number of people who aspired to be
the torch bearer of our society few years down the line.
Now, lets look at those 1% of
people who actually succeed. 80% of these people (yes, that’s true, almost 80%)
get into a stream of engineering that they haven’t even heard of before
actually joining that stream. A small fraction of them later on develop a taste
for it over time but then we can safely conclude that almost the same fraction
of people lose interest in the stream they picked as their first choice. So,
overall the net result is that 80% of these ‘bright’ students are actually
frustrated in this temple of high learning.
So that leaves us with
approximately 0.2% of people (99% + 80% of 1% are gone) who sat out on their
journey to become the top technocrat of India/world. That is less then 1000
people out of 4-5 lack people who begin by aspiring to be a top engineer/scientist,
a very pathetic state of affairs to say the least. BTW, a significant chunk of
these 1000 people escape to US universities or lost to non engineering streams (MBA through IIMs is one favorite route). Now, one may ask, how can I claim
that 99% of these people have accepted defeat at some level consciously or
unconsciously? Well, the proof of pudding is in eating. Few of these people
come back to IIT later on for
their PG and research studies. The overall quality of these students is
considered significantly below than undergrads by default. This is the unwritten rule in IIT
and accepted by all. Hence, even though these people are good but their self
esteem is deeply wounded which reflects in their academic achievements.
So what we ended up achieving in
final analysis, a few hundred good engineers at the cost of an entire
generation that either became frustrated or chose a path of mediocrity. If one
thinks little deeper, the above analysis also explains the root cause of
failure of IITs to get something world renowned, a largely indifferent/frustrated
student population. For majority of successful alumni of IIT, the only role these IITs played in their
journey is that these brilliant people had a stopover in IIT for some years before embarking on something
big.
So why are IITs responsible for
all this? I mean, you can ask, that what can they do if they have only limited
number of seats? They have to after all choose only few of the aspiring
candidates and they try to choose them in the most fair manner.
Well, lest I be misunderstood,
I’m not trying to lay the blame
on the doors of IITs. The failure lies at two levels:
- Even after 60 years of independence, we can give quality technical education to only some 1000 odd people? Isn’t that a very-2 big failure of our policy makers? Isn’t it a sad commentary on the state of affairs in our country? And aren’t IIT’s symbol of that failure? Even after so many years, and now as a new rising super power, this is all that we have? Few hundred for a country of 1,20,000,00,00 people. Forget about providing access to quality education to every deserving student, we are not able to do that to our best and brightest even. On what basis do we want to become the super power of tomorrow?
In fact, the
brand value of IIT itself is the
commentary on failure of our education system. If an engineering school with
such mediocre technical achievements can become such a big brand value, one can
gauge the extent of spread of mediocrity in our country and society at large.
- The second aspect of failure that that IITs symbolize (again the fault is not with IITs, the fault is completely with policy makers) is the lack of autonomy that our education institutes enjoy. Due to absence of this the basic tenets of scientific education get decimated. Students accept whatever comes their way without even questioning once. “Why I’m doing this? Ok, I got a rank in IIT, now I don’t have a choice but to get my self enrolled there. What I’m going to study there. Doesn’t matter?” If they can’t ask to themselves that why they are doing this, how do you expect them to question and answer bigger scientific challenges. The critical thinking is gone. Why it happened? Because there was no autonomy. Students can’t decide their area of study. IITs can’t change the composition of their classrooms. These are rather big things in fact, I mean you name it, right from top to bottom pretty much everything is controlled.
Hence, IITs not only symbolize
our failure to create sufficient world class institutes, they also symbolize
that even these very few are not managed properly. The other shortcomings of
IITs (like quality of research etc) are all the side effects of this bigger
malice.
No comments:
Post a Comment