siliconindia | | February 20198IN MY OPINIONWhen someone wants to learn, nobody can stop them from doing it. We have the old story of Eklavya who made a statue of his `guru' and practiced for years until he became an expert archer. Many stories of people are around sacrificing sleep and other pleasures of life, and making it through school or college abound. On the other hand, I feel that many parents throw good money on bad education for their children because it is the current craze. The rate at which engineers who work in IT companies are being mass-produced in India, which is not very funny. Very soon, Arts and Science colleges may shutdown at this rate.Maybe a similar craze is driving everyone to do an MBA today. Many students are just not best suited to do one, but they do it anyway. A large amount of effort goes waste on both sides - students and faculty. And maybe an opportunity is lost by the student to do something he really likes, and may turn-out to be really good at.At the school level, there is a great shortage of teachers - but ask any good student and teaching would be the last career on his mind. The state government run university system is all but dead, with multiple levels of irredeemable atrocities - in faculty appointments, student admission policies, curriculum design and so on. It may be impossible to do much about it except to write-off the system and start from scratch. At any rate, what must be immediately scrapped is the system of hundreds of colleges conducting common university exams. I am not sure who thought of this idiotic idea (the British, long ago, I suspect), and it is so outdated that the Neanderthal man would have difficulty identifying with it.Whether a college is private or government run, it must be autonomous and judged by only two criteria, i.e., the market and a non-government run agency, which gives it some sort of independent rating. Leave it to the students and society to kill a bad institution. Why should somebody in Delhi take on this foolish responsibility? Support the ones who do well on these ratings with incentives, which are substantial, if you wish. Those who wish to get the incentives, may work towards improving themselves.Foreign universities (and students) should be allowed in freely, because they are the best competition. Like it was good for industry, competition is good for education. Otherwise, we will be nowhere on the global stage. Large TEACHING & LEARNINGBy Rajendra Vishwanath Nargundkar, Professor & Dean, IIM, IndoreHeadquartered in Indore, IIM is an autonomous public business schooloffering various disciplines under Academic Programs and Exceutive Programs with its world-class academic standards.
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