It’s only after you have left school that it dawns upon you how little of what school taught us is actually of some benefit in your adulthood. You learnt about how one man’s ambition almost drove the entire world into apocalypse or how a skinny old man taught the world a lesson of non-violence but hardly ever will you ever come across the connection between the two.
Ability to learn data tells little about the intellect of a being but that is exactly where the education system takes you. Rote-learning is the skill you master in and your skill-set is defined by the quality of facilities your school had, who your teachers were and other vague reasons. It is never the curriculum that is taken upon as the criteria, which should not be the case.
All Indian and probably much of the other educational boards provide restricted options to choose from, for example, a being wanting to learn drama and geology at the same time might end up giving up either because both aren’t available together. This narrows your scope down resulting to which you must decide what you want to do in life when you don’t even know yourself. Not only does that limit your potential, it limit your creativity and curiosity to the point of eradication.
Absence of an array of options is not all. Pupils are never taught social and health education, resulting to which, much of the population lives in unhygienic personal space, many gain social anxiety, several lack confidence to speak up even in front of small groups and a large population of women is malnutritioned or anemic.
Another major setback is lack of proper Sex and Relationship Education. Simply being taught the mechanics does not mean the student is educated. Pupils deserve more than that. SRE should include sexual consent and the importance of respecting boundaries; contraceptive options; domestic violence and what a healthy relationship looks like; female genital mutilation; child marriage; LGBT issues; the importance of female pleasure; and all the technological advances with which young people are grappling. It would follow on naturally from the foundations laid in primary school, with pupils from the age of four onwards receiving age-appropriate relationship education,
as in the Netherlands – where this contributes to the very low teenage pregnancy rate.
Schools need to stop training the pupils and start education them. In reality, that is what will actually shape your character and mind better. Isn’t that what we truly need?