Wilted Dreams: A dive into the toxic nature of our education system
Written on May 13th, 2022 by {"login"=>"jcbphc21", "email"=>"f20181005@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in", "display_name"=>"Journal Club, BPHC", "first_name"=>"Journal Club", "last_name"=>"BPHC"}If you wanted to grab hold of someone, control everything that they could do, manipulate their mental and physical state and, in simple words, weave their entire reality - how would you do that? The most straightforward answer would be to start an educational institute and enroll them in it. This might sound absurd but think about it- who is unemployed yet bound to responsibilities and work, restricted to not do or say what they like, must bow to an authority that cannot be questioned, gives their time and leisure for pain and pressure and pays for their qualification to be judged? Bingo – it’s none other than us students.
If an academic institution were scaled up to a political system, it would resemble tyranny’s not-so-fond regime. We give up all our necessities and luxuries to the hands of the institute and allow them to control both our physical and mental health. Physical – by the food they provide and the conditions that we’re put in. And mental by how they treat us in a classroom and control what we do outside it. In exchange for selling the well-being of our mind and body, what we get in return is a chain of characters. To them, we are what we have printed on the card we carry, an ID number to the institute.
The intake is so high that the distinguishing factors are no longer our passions, ambitions, interests, and hobbies but are 13 alpha-numeric bits of characters that make us one of many - lost in the crowd and devoid of hope, having to shine through our grades and extra-curricular. But, the definition of these grades and how they evaluate proficiency in courses are quite muddily defined. They claim it determines how we compare to others but is the course approached in the same manner by every student? Does it mean someone with a better grade is more passionate about the course? This is obviously not true, so what do grades actually determine? They tell how consistent you were with the subject, they quantify how well you devised a plan to approach questions and your patience to endure the grunt work of the said subject. The question arises: How does one evaluate someone’s familiarity, interest, and raw joy induced by curiosity towards the topic? There is no singular and absolute answer to this question. Although it is a good place to start, knowledge persists through conversations, people you work with, and all your rights and wrongs, but certainly not by darkening the right bubble. Our system is incapable of giving us the chance to make mistakes. Being wrong is considered flawed, a sign of unpreparedness or stupidity, rather than an honest attempt at something new. While most of our problems boil down to logistical issues, there are too many of these to question and educators too few to resolve. The situation is so dire that it is not that we have been selected to study in prestigious institutes like ours, but instead, others have been filtered out - which is just a shame. Our evaluation is more like a quality check at the end of the factory process than personal and assiduous interaction.
The joy of studying is being choked by the intrusive rope of evaluations. Stress caused by academic components and the need to perform pushes students to extreme depression, isolation, confusion and self-doubts. Ironically, these pressure-inducing assignments are to be submitted by their “deadline,” as though the system is aware of its sadistic nature. While the students are ignorant of why they are learning what they are, they are more preoccupied with approaching averages and predicting how much they’ll have to score than learning for its sake. The current educational realm does not work based on excellence but on callous comparison; it is more about being better than others than being good in your own eyes.
The word academic comes from Academia, the name of the place where Plato taught. This wise and just philosopher spoke of education as an object which turns the soul towards the light. He described it as an elixir of the mind. Now the meaning has been debased, but I feel it is safe to say that the purpose of academics is not to be better than Sharmaji Ka beta.