“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire”

All of us, especially students and their parents, take great pleasure in complaining about how marks-oriented the education system in India is and how it suffocates creativity, innovation and the ‘student’ in every student. But, what we forget is: “When you point your finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back at you.”

Today, a Stephens or an SRCC unblinkingly demands a 95% for its top courses not because it takes great pride in setting new records but because if it doesn’t set its cut-offs so obscenely high, students would flock to it just for the brand name irrespective of where their inclination lies. IITJEE is so impossibly tough not because it takes a sadistic pleasure in mentally harassing students but because it wants to sieve out all those extra candidates who sit for it attracted only by the pay-packages that IITs almost guarantee to its graduates. To put it concisely, the reason why competition everywhere is “so tough” today is that students throng after degrees and placements instead of introspecting themselves and scrounging out what they are capable of doing, where their interest lies and, above all, what they are truly passionate about. Of course, parents who refuse to understand that their ward is also a human being and an individual do not help matters either.

Here, I am not overlooking the need for more top-notch colleges like SRCC, AIIMS, IITs and IIMs. Of course, we need more good institutes with better infrastructure, there is no debate about that. But it is more important that students choose the right institute and a course that is best suited for them. Because even if the government does start building more excellent places of higher education today, it would not be able to satiate the hunger of every student anytime soon considering the number of young minds this country is overpopulated with. And, besides, in today’s world, when information on every single subject is just a mouse click and a key-press away for most of us, one is not always wholly dependent on teachers and colleges when one is inflamed with a hunger to know more, a hunger that comes only when one is insanely passionate about the subject one wants information on.

To sum up, instead of complaining incessantly of how our education system needs a complete overhaul, students should make themselves the harbinger of change by thinking, choosing and ‘studying’ correctly instead of following herd-mentality. Education should be a pursuit for more knowledge and not degrees and placements. It is time that we take all those quotes which lecture us on knowledge, passion and education, and expel the unwanted mud from our world in order to live a more illuminated and satisfied life. Because, 3 Idiots was as much about quotes that are read, appreciated and forgotten as it was about satirizing the Indian education system.