Train kids in practical skills

DC Sharma
Career psychologist and  former head, English dept, MCM DAV College, Kangra   

Technical education is a ray of hope for many. It should be introduced at an early stage in our system of education. If learners are trained with practical skills early in life, they can become expert masters in their respective fields. That is why the son of a carpenter learns carpentry and starts earning a little, ignoring further education as he knows that even after passing higher classes he is not going to get a job. Where are the jobs that our leaders promise for the youth? The few that are available are offered to the near and dear ones of leaders. Such sons of carpenters and those of farmers too prefer to go to foreign lands where they feel that their livelihood is at least secure.

India is in need of an education system that focuses on realistic approaches to solving problems, rather than on listening to the counselling that our leaders try to provide to the students. The youth need jobs and livelihood-earning practical methodologies rather than making pakoras. What for do the children go to schools and colleges if ultimately they are to make pakoras? Such poor advisory is what actually ails our system.  

So, how to focus on the realistic approaches to solving real problems? Herein comes the role of a teacher. The teacher can help analyse the strategies that can be used to solve real life problems. But in our education system, the teacher is rarely consulted. And even if he is consulted, the practical ideas that he suggests are rarely implemented. Here too political leaders have their say and do as they wish and intend to do. The teacher who is in the thick of things that relate to the students' interests is ignored. Even the officers are made to follow what the leaders order them to do. 

How can a leader provide the tools and environments that help learners interpret his life situations through learning when he is not aware of the real life problems of the particular learner? It is only the teachers involved who know what can facilitate a learner to acquire the skills that can help improve his life and career.

The evaluation process of our education system is faulty. It does not serve as a self-analysis tool for the learner, which is actually the basic purpose of evaluation. In ancient India, the teachers would put a pupil in real life like situations, and see how he faces it and comes out with the help of some practical solutions. That's what real education stands for! And that is what our education lacks today!

In order to make education productive and constructive, instructional goals and objectives should be negotiated and not imposed. But entirely opposite steps are being taken in our system. Age-old syllabi are being imposed upon teachers who are ordered to teach them in letter and spirit, caring a fig whether it will benefit the students. And the result? We are preparing an army of unemployable youth, who when getting no jobs, and not preferring to do small jobs, ultimately become the bone of problems for society. Doesn't all this add to the spread of gundagardi in the length and breadth of India? Where then does the counselling provided by our leaders from time to time go?   

The recent step of Narendra Modi to address the younger generation of students how to fare well in the approaching exams appears to be laudatory. But what he forgets to observe is that it is not the students alone who can reach the heights with self efforts; it is their teachers who need to be coached on how to prepare them for the ultimate career competition upon which their whole future may depend. Of course, the teachers have to be of high quality and be impeccably honest and sincere at their job. 

Surely, all is not well with the education of our wards.