A mid life confession

I have a fake degree.

And I think I’m not alone, most of us Indians too have fake degrees. Please stay with me till the end of this article to prove it to you. I have a Bachelor degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from one of the esteemed and accredited universities in India. But I don’t remember a single thing that I learnt in my college. And it’s not that I don’t remember it now - 23 years after passing out from college; I don’t think I remembered it even then – immediately after stepping out of the gate. And I passed with honours, mind you!! The thing is I never used a single thing I learnt in college. May be people who studied medicine and law might be an exception. Of course, having a degree helped me a get a job in a reputed IT services company, perhaps a dream job of sorts in those days. The company considered only our analytical and problem-solving skills during recruitment and taught us whatever was needed to do the job during the training period. So basically, I earnt a living for over 2 decades with the 6 months training. Of course, in IT, you have to continuously learn and remain relevant as technologies change fast. But you get the gist of the absurdity.

And its not just my story. When I look around, I see friends, cousins, acquaintances all sailing in similar boats. People studied courses totally unaligned with their interest for lack of knowing what is their interest or succumbing to pressures of what is considered as viable career options. You will find all possible weird combinations, studied science in higher secondary yielding to peer pressure to be a doctor, took degree/diploma in business administration or lab technician course or microbiology, further changed stream into computer applications or law or education and finally ended up as a banker or IT professional or teacher. And the result – an unhappy and confused soul having a midlife crisis on their purpose of life while continuing in a job with a tired mind lacking any energy forget passion. Perhaps, one of the reasons why we as a nation lurks among the bottom slots in any happiness index lists.

An average person spends 15-16 years studying in school and college to get a Bachelor degree. If you are doing Masters, add another couple of years in the duration. The supposedly most beautiful and careless years in most people’s lives. But is that the case? At least to me, it was not the case. I was a decent student. And I remember having to squeeze out the last neuron in my brain to get good marks, clear competitive exams. When I look around, I don’t think the children of this generation also will feel that childhood or growing up years are as beautiful as they are made to sound. Children are overwhelmed with competition and to compensate over burdened with classes both academic and otherwise. In our community where I stay, we tried to start a reading club and few other interesting sessions for kids, but realised that kids even 9-year-olds are too busy to spare 1 hour in a week from their schedule of attending school, tuition, music class, sports coaching and what not to find time for anything out of the box.  

The point I’m trying to drive is that we are ruining the most beautiful period of someone’s life. Rather everyone’s life with our system of education. These 15-16 years that we spend in school, college are the times when you could be carefree, discover your strengths and focus on learning with passion and interest. These are the times we should get to explore, be allowed to try and fail, get to think freely. When you do not get to experience this, but are forced to study without really understanding the subject and feel unhappy every moment doing that, isn’t it a humongous waste of human potential? I’m not advocating a system where children need to feel happy all the time. That’s not the point. One needs to put effort into learning, but at least it should be the right kind of learning which will evoke curiosity and bring satisfaction to the learner. Let’s just take a minute to compute the wastage of human years here. 15 billion years considering a population of 1 billion. Let me just discount 5 billion years to factor the outliers; even then a loss of 10 billion human years which if used correctly, imagine where we would have been as a society, as a nation.

Now what is stopping us from experiencing all this. In a system where good grades are the only scale to get admission for higher education or get a job, when there are few good colleges in comparison to the population making it an impossible competition, when the curriculum is pretty inflexible forcing children to study things not aligning with their interest, when there are very few teachers who chose the profession out of their passion, things like curiosity, aptitude, application, window of failure etc takes a backseat. In a poor country like India, good education- read having a degree, is your only way to survive, forget meet your aspirations for most of the population. So, the rat race begins early in life. “Vidyadhanam sarvadhanal pradhaanam” is a value every Indian grows up with. Such a noble and profound statement. However, the trouble is in the implementation. Everyone acknowledges our education system was designed by the British to produce obedient and subservient clerks for their administration. But we are celebrating the 75th year of independence and now it’s too lame an excuse to continue to blame them. Very little or no reform has happened in this field and what bothers me even more is the lack of sense of urgency.

NEP 2020 (National education policy 2020) came as a beacon of hope and I tried to read through the fine print, listen to the numerous analysis videos of the same to understand the nuances. Policy is definitely encouraging with its suggestions on introducing more flexibility in curriculum, focus on vocational training etc. However, I truly wonder how they are going to implement these changes in the currently messed up system. For instance, when you are already grossly understaffed in most government schools where a single teacher is teaching most subjects irrespective of their expertise, how are you going to teach the children carpentry and plumbing. Even the private schools seem to be clueless on the implementation part of NEP and seems to be waiting mode regarding implementations. This will be like trying to change the course of a ship. It will take time, but hopefully changes will happen in due course. And till then onus seems to be on us individuals to be more mindful about our children’s education.

Pressure on parents along with the children is increasing with each generation. My parents’ generation jokes around that the father hardly knew which class the children were studying or never having to attend a PTM in their life. A parent’s job started and ended in continuously pestering children to study without knowing what exactly is going on at school. And children eventually ended up doing what everyone is doing. With each generation, parents are becoming more “woke”, however still forced to be practical about the realities of competition and survival in a developing nation. And this balancing act is tough. While the parents in earlier generations didn’t really plan much about the child’s education compared to today’s parent who is trying to ensure child is having all possible opportunities, results seem to be pretty much the same – everyone mostly yielding to peer pressure and ending up studying viable courses not aligned to one’s interest and people with a basket of disjointed qualifications most of which they hardly understand anything about. Well, that’s what I call a fake degree. What do you say?

(*There might be a minority of privileged lot who discovers their interests early on, gets to study what they are interested in and earn a living from what they studied. And by privilege, I don’t necessarily mean financial privilege, but privilege of having parents and eco system with intellectual exposure and guts. All I can say is I envy them, so do the millions of others like me. 😊)