navigational guide to the indian education system
Let me begin with a confession: I am a recovering clerk. For 12 years, I was part of India’s most ambitious social engineering project since the caste system. Five schools across three provinces taught me one immutable truth: India doesn’t educate children. It processes human biomass into compliant office stationary.
The Indian education system is a masterpiece of colonial extraction machinery, now perfected for producing the world's finest corporate drones. It's as if the British left, but their bureaucratic mongers remained to haunt the hallways of every school, whispering, "More clerks! We need more clerks!"
There are three most popular boards of education in India. CBSE, ICSE, and the State board. Oh you did IB or A-level? How adorably bourgeois of you. Those are for the elite 0.1% planning their great escape to foreign shores. For the rest? Welcome to the clerk factory.
From ages 6-16, you’ll ingest approximately 4.3 tons of paper, 6,800 hours of teacher monologues, and 142 “innovative” projects involving chart paper and glitter.
Schools teach children to Dream Big! (But Only Within Syllabus). Why ask ‘why’? when the answer is in Equation 3.12. Highlight and move on! This is how you create a generation that can recite the quadratic formula but couldn't explain why it works if you put a gun to their head.
"But what about critical thinking?" you ask. Oh, you sweet summer child. Critical thinking is a luxury we simply can't afford. We're too busy producing the next generation of obedient workers. You think TCS wants thinkers? They need button-pushers who won't question legacy COBOL systems.
Finish 35 algebra problems? Here’s 50 more. Time off on a Saturday? Memorize Gandhi's 1928 breakfast menu for "Value Education". You are not the future of this country. You are the protagonist in a Dostoevsky novel who's told that suffering builds character and Khan Academy can solve all your problems.
This is not education; this is indoctrination with a syllabus.
At 15, you go through the assessment of your life: The Board Exams. You're told that this is the most important year of your life. Teachers morph into Taliban-esque syllabus enforcers and your childhood dies screaming under 47 revisions of "The Road Not Taken".
A teacher, in his moment of profound wisdom, told my parent: "Teach your kid to be a warrior, not a worrier." Yes, because that's what education should be - a war. Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" is now required reading, right next to trigonometry.
And heaven forbid you try to use a calculator for your math problems. Oh you snarky, vicious little fellow. Mechanical calculators existed before this country gained independence, but apparently, they're still too advanced for our 21st-century classrooms. You must learn to do complex calculations by hand because... um... what if you're stranded on a desert island with only a trigonometry problem and no batteries? The real world runs on Excel, Python, and AI, but sure, let's do long division by hand.
To be fair, schools do care about your mental well-being. Once in a while, you're baited to attend some mandatory fun activities. You look forward to the bi-annual zoo trips where you're herded like the animals you're observing. Ah the annual function! what a wonderful time that was. Parents watch their children dance on "Desh Rangila" for the 50th time and the school principle proudly ticks the box next to extracurricular activities.
You're introduced to the booming options of the future--IIT, NEET, and NDA. Indians are simple people. 5.5 million engineers graduate annually in India. Impressive, no? Well, 82% of them are unemployable. I dare you to try it out. Ask a recently graduated engineer from a respectable university to draw a free-body diagram of an object on an inclined plane. I dare you.
It's almost as if testing compliance doesn't actually prepare you for the real world. Who could have possibly foreseen this shocking turn of events?
"But surely there must be a solution!" I hear you cry. Oh, there are plenty of solutions proposed. More technology in classrooms! Skill-based learning! Holistic assessment! Each one more utterly useless than the last, because they all ignore the fundamental problem: the system isn't broken, it's working exactly as intended.
The irony is palpable when our education "experts" fly to Helsinki for inspiration, then return to implement "Finnish principles" in elite private schools charging ₹7 lakh annually—making sure this educational paradise remains as inaccessible to the average Indian child as a summer home on Mars. Comparing an Indian classroom to a Finnish one is like comparing a North Korean military parade to a Montessori playgroup.
As mentioned above, I survived five different schools across three states. It's all the same circus, just different clowns. The textbooks change, the uniforms change, but the soul-crushing monotony remains constant. It's like a grand tour of India's finest intellectual prisons.
When would we stop normalizing this? Our entire concept of attaining knowledge is breached. Whatever this madness really is, it's most certainly anti-knowledge. This misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine converts the quest for truth into a quest for certainty. There is no intuition of moonshot ideas or the pursuit of sheer curiosity. It's all about the next corporate job and the average yearly package.
Do we even have arrogance anymore? To conjecture bold explanations? To be curious because you want to be and not because you have to be? To do things that won’t happen unless we do it ourselves?