The recent decision by the education ministry to do away with the Class 10 exams [Related article by Atul] to ‘reduce trauma’ amongst students is an interesting step in the currently fashionable trend of simplifying our education system. However, a piecemeal approach to this noble aim will achieve little, if any, positives, while at the same time, undermining the strength of an education system which has stood us in good stead over the last few decades – the academic rigour which sets Indians apart at the global level.

We have one of the most rigid and inflexible educational systems in the world. You select a career path, and god help you if, mid-way through, you realize that what you have chosen is not quite for you. And these career-defining decisions have to be taken at the incredibly mature age of fifteen, after you give your Class 10 exams. If you don’t take biology when you start off with class 11, darn, sorry, you can’t become a doctor now. If you think that sociology interests you, you aren’t fit to be an engineer. By the time you pass out of Class 12, your scope is pretty much limited. It’s no wonder that half of us want to get into an engineering college post Class 12 despite having no inclinations towards studying it.

As traumatic as the Class 10 experience can be, I believe that it is necessary if we are to stay with the current system of higher education in India. What Class 10 teaches you is that there is one way in this system. You can either stop complaining about it and get down to business or get out and basically have a wee bit of a larger problem on your hands. This bit of reality, although unpleasant, is necessary, for it is inevitable that a large section of us are going to end up doing stuff which drives us up the wall or just does not drive us at all for the rest of our lives. Unless we liberalize the rest of our education system, and adopt a system which lets us move across specializations as we mature and grow as individuals, we ought to have this. Delaying this is delaying the inevitable. Class 10 and 12 exams are a sort of a baptism by fire in our educational system, after the mindlessness of these two things, you can take pretty much whatever the system can throw at you.

What we do need is a complete overhauling of the education system, from Class 10 to the post-graduate level. We need to rethink our obsession with specializations and our focus on extremely narrow and pre-specified career paths. One of the committees on higher education recently came out with a report (unfortunately, I cannot recall what this one was, exactly), but the gist of it was that we need to rethink our system of IITs and IIMs with extreme focus on a very narrow field. The IITs have already taken a step in that direction by introducing courses in Medicine. We need world class universities which allow students to select courses from a wide variety of disciplines without sacrificing their career interests. A business graduate or an engineer who has studied sociology or psychology is quite likely to be better off than one who hasn’t, something which our current system fails to understand.

As India grows and turns into a developed economy, we need to ensure that our education system follows suit. Unfortunately, while are cities turn increasingly westernized and modern – and I mean in terms of way of thinking – our towns and villages continue to exist in the way they have been over the last few decades. What we probably need is a dual system of education, one which identifies the needs of both of these increasingly disparate groups to create a system which can best serves our interests as a nation. Trying to tinker with the current system without taking a holistic perspective is dangerous and will only serve towards creating a hopscotch mix which achieves little.

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