Habitually Good

I have always loved my country and so it is painful to see how slowly our own government is sending us back to the dark ages. We Indians have always prided ourselves as being smart and hard working. Now, I may not like it, but the reason for this has been the schooling system that we have had in place so far.

It’s always been super competitive and super hard. This results in graduates who are far better both in terms of how smart they are, and how hard they can work. But here are some of the actions taken recently which I believe are going to remove this advantage over time:

• Karnataka government has imposed a fine on any school which teaches English – I was appalled to read this. In a world where parents are looking to teach their kids more than 2 foreign languages, our government decides that the one language which is universal is something that our kids don’t need to learn (and this from a state which led the IT revolution in India).
• The minimum age for children to hit school is now 4 years – I started school when I was 2 and a quarter years of age. Not only have they increased the age for starting school, they have also eased on the amount of learning that the child will have to do when he does start school.
• They made the entrance to the BEST institute in India really easy – This week it was the JEE exam for the IITs. Now IITs ARE the toughest institutes to get into in India and produce a very HIGH percentage of future leaders from India. This year’s entrance exam was SUPER easy. What that does is that it puts the best brains almost at par with the average guys. An easy exam, thus, introduces a lot of chance in the system. So, if a real stud makes a couple of mistakes on some easy questions, he gets beaten by someone who is not so smart.

I am not even going to start about the judgments on providing reservations for minority communities. Somehow, I am getting a feeling of doom. I wonder if I am right?

[tag]India[/tag]

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