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Is practical experience compulsory in education?
By Binu Paul, SiliconIndia
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Wednesday, 12 January 2011, 14:06 IST |
20 Comments
750 crore a year on educating and training our workforce. We are being forced to do what universities should have done."
Vivek Wadhwa, tech entrepreneur, academic, researcher, and writer wrote in a recent article in Business Week that although India and China graduate three to six times more engineers than does the United States, the quality of these engineers is, however, so poor that most are not fit to join the workforce. Indian industry has to spend large sums of money on retraining its employees.
Students especially in business schools in the U.S. are usually required to have a few years of professional work experience to enter into their graduate programs. Schools make it compulsory for students to enroll into voluntary services during the holidays. This provides the students an understanding about the work culture before they actually step into the professional world. It additionally provides them with the adequate soft skills as well.
It is a necessary lesson that we need to learn from the western education system. While this system (apprenticeship, internships, and cooperative education) supports the students to manage their small luxuries, the ultimate aim is to provide adequate practical experience in the profession they wish to pursue and to enrich other soft skills needed as they graduate out of school or college.
Heading the National Knowledge Commission(NKC), the Indian tech evangelist Sam Pitroda stated that it is necessary to scale up the pace of development, both in education and vocational training in India. He opined that to excel in the global competitive landscape, we need to upgrade our teachers and bring research in our universities with a focus on research laboratories.
Very few students pursue internships during their college in India because Indian educational system is focused more on marks than on students gaining practical exposure. In most of the developed countries, internships are extensively used as a tool to recruit talent. Because of the peculiar character of our educational culture, the private companies do not use internships as a recruitment model in India. In western countries, it is not uncommon for former interns to acquire full-time employment at an organization once they have enough necessary experience.
The Indian educational system should have a method to ensure practical applications of theories in the context of our social and economic structure. We should also understand that education is a continuous process and its basic structure should be updated according to the changes and developments occurring in the world. There should be a smooth transition from a rote-learning system to more of a practical exposure, skill and industry based education which helps students to understand the concepts better.
