“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him how to catch a fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. It is an oft-quoted saying and one full of social wisdom, however this wisdom is lost on our education system.

This wasn’t always the case.

Decades ago, as we have learnt from our books, a guru would serve as the medium for secular and spiritual enlightenment. Students, irrespective of their social standing would serve at a gurukul in exchange for knowledge and guidance of their gurus. In recent times, however, the purpose of schooling has been reduced to merely prepare the student for exams and join the race. Every year, Indian students focus on cramming as much information as they can for the exams and forget everything the very next day, and yet, our education system seems to be devoted in rewarding the best crammers. This is one of the most fundamental flaws of our education system.

Here are a few ways our education system can change for the better.

1)Encourage Originality over Memorising

Memorising is no learning; the biggest flaw in our system is that it incentivizes memorising over original ideas. There is no scope for a student to deviate from the recommended “syllabus”. That is all well and good , if our system was up to global standards, but it barely manages churn out students who can say that they have had a fruitful education. What I am basically trying to say is, there is no point in producing tens of thousands of engineers every year, if the majority end up working at call centres.

2) Education is a fundamental right

If we look at the statistics, the number of universities in india has increased by 34 times between 1950-2014 and the number of colleges have increased by 74 times in that period. This staggering explosion in quantity is not observed in the quality of the education. Many students hailing from low-income families drop out because they feel that high school education will not help them get a job. One way to tackle this problem is to increase the quality of education in rural areas rather than continuously focusing on colleges and universities that already boast a quality education, like IITs and IIMs.

Last but not the least important is:

3) Hire good teachers

Many of us in school might have heard the teacher say “If you don’t study it will be your loss, I am still going to get my salary” . As kids, we thought this was only a way to motivate students to be serious, however nothing is farther from the truth. The reality of the situation is, especially in rural areas and small towns is that “teaching” is considered a safe, risk-free and a low-pressure jobs. The simple fact of the matter is that these so called teachers have no incentive to be better at their job which they are only doing to put food on the table.

So, one might blame all the teachers in our country for a bad education, but it is unfair to do so because they too were brought up in a vicious cycle of memorising, appearing for the exam and forgetting everything the very next day.

In conclusion, the only way to fight for this fundamental right is that we, as citizens and literates should propagate awareness regarding this issue, and do what we can in our own little ways to set this right.