The Hindu Business Line : Tomorrow's talent pool

To capitalise on one of the country's biggest resources — people, there is a need for some initiatives... the first of which is rethinking primary education.

It is surprising and unfortunate that there has been little experimentation in the way we educate our children in the nearly 60 years of our independence.

Primary focus: A vibrant nation needs schools that can instil a thirst for learning. A Corporation school in Chennai.- K.V. SRINIVASAN

During the turn of the 19th century, in agrarian economies land was the most precious commodity. Raw material and, subsequently, oil replaced land as the most valuable resource, as the industrial revolution gathered pace around the world. But in the emerging knowledge economy, talent will rule the roost.

In the 1970s and 1980s, economists and politicians considered India's burgeoning population as its biggest problem. Two decades on, India's large population is one of its biggest assets, giving it access to an enviable wealth of talent and making it one of the most exciting consumer markets in the world.

India is today one of the youngest countries in the world, with over 500 million people below 21 years of age, with a median age of 24 years. Compare this to a median of 36 years in the US, 30 in China, 37 in Russia and 38 in the UK.

However, this abundance of human resource by itself will not help India succeed. It is only by leveraging its assets that India can hope to grow and become a global leader.

Consider these facts: Of the 200-plus million children in the 6-14 age group, only 82.5 per cent enrol in a school.

Of these, 35 per cent drop out during the primary school stage and another 53 per cent at the upper primary level. And the quality of education is abysmal — many of the fourth graders cannot even read or write!

Of the over three million people graduating out of colleges every year, just about 5 lakh are deemed employable in an international corporate workplace.

In certain categories such as general graduates, the employability figure drops to 10 per cent of the graduating class.

While the IT/BPO industry itself is expected to have a shortage of 7.5 lakh managers, in the overall workforce of 300 million people, I'm sure that the shortfall of managers is a few million.

The focus areas

While there are many areas where action is required, the focus areas are:

Rethinking primary education to make it more effective, with 100 per cent coverage

Making secondary and high school education far more vocation-focused

Creating world-class professionals in every walk of life

Creating a large and diverse managerial talent base.

In this article, we'll look at primary education.

Rethinking primary education

The structure and content of formal education should be determined by what a child needs to know to be a productive member of society, over and above what a child will anyway learn from its family and friends as it grows up.

Studies on why children drop out of school have found that non-availability of schooling facilities account for only 10-15 per cent of dropouts.

A much larger percentage drops out because the children and/or their parents don't see the relevance of education to their current and future context. A large percentage doesn't attend eight hours of school because they have to participate in the basic tasks of the household economy.

Our current system of education is inherited from the British and may not be appropriate in our economic and social context — especially at a village level. It is surprising and unfortunate that there has been little experimentation in the way we educate our children in the nearly 60 years of our independence.

We need to rethink many of the principles of education that we take for granted today.

The current education system seems to focus on helping children cram facts and concepts. These days we expect our children to learn too much.

Instead, we should focus on teaching children a smaller set of reading, writing, numerical and scientific competencies that are deemed absolutely essential. And spend time on building abilities in applying this knowledge to real-life problems.

It may not be possible for children — especially in rural areas, where their time could be spent in income-generating activities — to spend eight hours in a classroom each day. We should put in place systems that require far less classroom hours, and emphasise on games and exercises that children can do in their free time. Schools must encourage curiosity and instil a thirst for learning. We must use strong feedback and reward mechanisms to drive self-learning.

Albert Einstein said imagination is better than knowledge; our schools should nurture creativity and imagination, rather than make children learn by rote. As a first step, we can experiment with new approaches to education in the rural areas, where there is a crying need for such new ideas, before we adopt them more widely across the country.

Besides practical knowledge, we must instil basic human, professional and collaboration values and practices. While principles are important, practices that reflect these principles are even more so.

Families contribute to some extent in building these values, but schools can further this process. This can start with simple practices around personal hygiene to norms of conduct, interpersonal relationship and teaming.

The Japanese keep particularly large and heavy toys in their kindergarten schools so that no child can play with a toy by herself — by necessity he or she needs to team up with other kids to play!

Teachers will have an important role to play in the process of transforming our education system. We must retrain and reorient the over three million primary teachers to adopt these new methods. This is no small challenge. It calls for a radical change from the current approaches to pedagogy and a much higher level of commitment from teachers.

We will need to add to the base of committed teachers through a combination of measures — better remuneration, more volunteers, possibly from the retired community, enlightened homemakers, and more participation from industry. We will need better systems of oversight and accountability. Finally, we will need to find innovative tools and technology alternatives to increase the overall quality of teaching.

All this is possible. It requires a set of committed people, across various disciplines to come together to draw up a new vision. It requires the government to increase allocation and use more effectively the funds already allocated to education.

The National Policy on Education, 1986, had set a goal of 6 per cent of GDP on education spending. We are currently at 3.74 per cent. With modest increases in funding, combined with larger doses of creativity and commitment, we can truly create the talent base for a world-class India within the next decade.

As Mahatma Gandhi said: "Money invested in the promotion of learning gives a tenfold return to the people..."

(The author is CEO, Mastek group. He can be contacted at sudhakarr@mastek.com)

More Stories on : Education | Resurgent India

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Salad days in Hyderabad

Healing breath

Promoting `true' education

Tomorrow's talent pool

Basking in Railway glory

Arrival on time!

The land of a thousand myths

Happiness (un)Ltd