| Friday, 06 September 2024 |
An abridged, narrative version of the latest episode of Two by Two, The Ken’s premium weekly business podcast Subscribe here
Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
School education is a fundamental right in India. An average Indian child spends 10–12 years in school. And for most parents and families, the money they spend on educating children is one of their largest expenses over time.
And yet, school education is slowly becoming (or perhaps being made) irrelevant for what follows after: college.
“In Delhi, the school education is demonetised.
You want to study further, you need to write CUET [Common University Entrance Test].
Every Delhi student has to write CUET to get into any undergrad programme anywhere in Delhi.
It is so criminal because what is being taught in the school then? And 85% of the students in Delhi are in government schools.
They can’t afford coaching nor go through coaching, right?
And when you now see the demographics of the Delhi University students, you realize that you have disenfranchised a certain set of people because you impose something on them which has not been taught in the schooling system, and someone else who is going through a coaching system is possibly coming through the whole thing.”
That was Maheshwer Peri, the founder and CEO of Careers360, a company that helps millions of students explore career plans. Mahesh was an investment banker with SBI Capital Markets, after which he worked with the Outlook group for 17 years, with 10 years spent heading it.
He was one of three guests for this week’s episode of Two by Two.
Welcome to episode #8 of Two by Two, The Ken’s weekly podcast that asks the most interesting and often uncomfortable questions on topics we all want to know more about. And we—my co-host Praveen Gopal Krishnan, our guests, and I—do that through the lens of a 2×2 matrix.
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India’s school education system is vast, involving 59 boards, including three at the national level and 56 at the state level.
Of these, 41 boards manage both secondary and higher secondary exams, while 18 focus solely on one category.
A distinctive feature of India’s education system is the varied syllabi across boards.
While most adhere to the NCERT syllabus, six boards, including those in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and West Bengal, continue to follow their own curricula, highlighting ongoing debates about educational standardisation.
“As the child comes into middle school and high school, that’s when parents start to think, what is he/she going to do?
Unfortunately, a lot of people have got down this competition preparation curse all the way down to grade six under the garb of Foundation courses.
One of the byproducts of competition exams being so important to get admission into college is that schools are now offering integrated programmes, which means that you’re not only preparing for board exams, but also doing what they call higher-level math, higher-level science.
So earlier, if it was 11th, 12th grade, it started becoming 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th. Now, it’s starting from grade six.”
That was Sumeet Mehta, co-founder and co-CEO, LEAD Group. LEAD offers school edtech solutions across 8,000 schools in India, which in turn touch over 3.5 million students.
Sumeet was our second guest for this episode.
We were discussing the rise of the centralised entrance exams as the entry gate into a good college.
This has been true for getting into the IITs and IIMs of the world. You had to attempt JEE and CAT respectively to get through to the next rounds. As Sumeet noted:
“I think in our generation, we had competitive exams. But if you go back one generation to my father’s generation, just immediately after independence, board exams were actually the criteria to get into higher education.
If you go back to the root, what happened was that the quality of the board exams basically went down, or it just was testing for rote (learning).
Some engineering colleges and medical colleges said they want to set a higher bar and they introduced the entrance exam.
Everybody (else) basically started to catch on.
So it is a combination of the lack of innovation in the board exams, because if you look at a CBSE or a state board, it basically tests for memory.”
India is currently in a slow but undeniable downward spiral with its school-to-college education system—the best method to not just harness its demographic dividend, but also help poorer families make the socio-economic leap.
The schools-exams-college “chain” is broken. Perhaps because it is now the schools-private coaching-exams-college chain.
And your school education is not going to be enough for you to make the cutoff as millions line up to clear these exams every year.
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