A strategy for education
In the past few months, there were several articles written about India's plan to improve its education system. As I read them, I was amazed at their ambitious goals of jumping ahead of developed countries in education to prepare India for the next hundred years. The plan called for the building of over 1,000 universities and 50,000 vocational colleges within the next ten years to cope with the increasing numbers of young people, estimated to be more than 100 million by 2020.
The Indian's education plan is focusing on preparing these hundreds of millions young people for jobs in the technology industry. Since India's population is increasing by several millions each year, the gap between rich and poor continues to increase with a large number of poor and uneducated young people. To help narrowing this gap, India has designed an ambitious plans to provide more opportunities to its citizens by offering a new approach to education. Its goal is to provide education service that is affordable, accessible, and convenient than the existing one. The plan also serves as foundation to transform India from an agriculture society into a knowledge society by having large number of educated workers.
According to my friend Ravi, what India is doing is not differ from what China has been doing in the past few years. Both countries understand that education is the key for economic prosperity and political stable. In 2000, 8 percent of China's youth went on to college, compared with 10 percent in India. But by 2007, China's enrollment rate had risen to 23 percent versus 12 percent in India. Today both countries are investing in education, but with different approach.
My friend, Ravi analyzes the two approaches as the difference between quantity and quality. He concluded that China's plan is to provide education in quantity to keep young people in schools rather than based it on a vision. The China's plan allows massive number of private schools and universities to operate, regardless of what they taught, and how their students learn. Whatever the market needs, these private schools will offer to attract paying students. Basically private schools has become a profitable business create to meet the job market demands rather than respected education institutions. While it would be a temporary fix to educate some people but China still needs labor workers to continue its massive approach to export manufacturing products. It could be a reason that China is not serious about educate its million of citizens. After all, China is still a relationship-based society with no defined clear processes and laws. Regardless of the degree or education, a person still needs the support of the well-connected people to get jobs. Therefore, education is still considering a social mobility for individual rather than about national economic development.
The India's education plan is different. It is focusing on a national strategy that aim at particular sectors such as information technology, biotechnology, and agriculture. The goal is to achieve the same quality as developed countries and eventually jump ahead of them. It seems that India is well aware of the future global market as it knows exactly what to focusing on. The India's plan clearly defined four steps: It begins with high academic standards and curriculum based on the best schools in the U.S and UK. (Many programs are licensed from top U.S Schools and Indian professors are trained to deliver them). The second step is set up a testing system to measure performance of students to determine whether students are meeting those high standards. (To ensure the quality of education and the training programs). The third step is to invest in training better teachers in their schools. (Government spends a large amount of money to send college professors to U.S and UK for additional trainings). The last step is to increase the amount of time in class and making longer school day and longer school year to ensure that India will have an “educated workforce” for the future. That is the launch pad to jump ahead of developed countries.
Ravi explained to me: “Our culture is based on a “caste” system. Rich and middle income people always send their children to schools but the poor, the “untouchable” never go to school. They accept their faith and live in slums with no hope of the future. That is why we need to unleash this huge potential by educate all of them to build our economy. Our new education plan is not about filling students' head with books but it is about lighting a fire in their heart. You can have the best education system but you cannot open up students' head and pour knowledge in. The new education plan is focusing on entrepreneurship because our poor people need passion to start their own business. We want to be the best technology country in this information age. We want to create our own “Microsoft” and “Facebook” companies that someday will be the top companies in the IT industry.”
“We have hundred millions of poor and uneducated people who live in slums. They do not see education as the way out of poverty so we start to motivate them first. Let me give you a simple example that we did: Last month, several of us took young people from the slums and brought them to our top software companies like Infosys, TCS and Wipro. Before we took them inside, we let them walk through the parking lot and we said: “See all of these beautiful cars. The Mercedes, the BMW, the Ferrari etc. That is what software engineers drive today. That is why you have to go to school and study software.” Then we took them inside these companies to see how software engineers work. They all have nice desks in offices in air conditioned room and we said: “See all these nice offices, that is where software engineers work. That is why you need to study technology”. We asked them to guess how much a software engineer make a day. Most could not imagine that an average software engineer make about $65 dollars a day when most of them make about 50 cents a day in the slums, collecting disposable things from garbage heaps. After the trip, most young people from the slums, who never consider to go to schools are eager to enroll in school. They know what they want and they know what they can do with an education. They see their future and the fire in their heart has been lit. In the past ten months, we enrolled several millions of them in schools. The most amazing thing is very few dropped out as most remain in our classes.”
Ravi continued: “Of course India cannot build ten thousands universities like the U.S or U.K. Many of our new schools will be virtual because we pushes the concept of online education further than any other country. To educate hundred million people, we need million of teachers but there is no way to train so many teachers that fast. Especially we are adopting new training programs based on best schools in the U.S so online is the solution. Currently all teachers lectures are taped and broadcasted via TV, radio and on internet websites where students can access easily to these virtual classes. That is the only way India can “build up” our robust education systems to massively educate million of new students each year. We know that it takes time to build a good education system but we hope that overtime, it will be better. Today the demand for technology workers is high and we have so many people that need jobs. By invest in our own people, by invest in our own education, we can get many high paying technology jobs to our country. In this globalized world, opportunity like this do not come easily. If we do not act now, we may miss it forever because other countries such as China or Malaysia are not standing still. Since we already grab a large part of it and we have to keep it.”
Ravi told me: “We already reaching $100 Billion dollars in exporting software. We have a goal of getting $200 billion by 2025. We have created several million new jobs each year but we need more as our population is still increasing. The best job is in technology and we invest our future in it.”
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
