Let them play computer games

 How can the prince reach the crow-master, who, after having been slashed to pieces after a deft bout of swordsmanship, has flapped out of death in the form a dozen misshapen crows and reassembled himself on a castle battlement to which there is no obvious means of traverse? As the teenager’s mind races and he strategises a route that involves multiple launching pads for superhuman leaps, his mother comes up from behind and orders him to shut down the computer. He has entertained himself enough for the day, with TV, football with his friends, and at least 100 pages of Eragon, re-read for the nth time. Time he got back to his maths. After all, he has do well in his 12th Board exams, do better in assorted entrance exams and prepare himself for a successful life. The son protests that he has already studied enough for the day. This is a routine piece of family drama acted out in most middle-class homes of urban India with much sincere passion on the part of all members of the cast involved. In most cases, it continues as intermittent farce till the exams finally get over. Rarely, it ends as tragedy of the kind that was witnessed in Delhi recently, where a girl, who eventually got 94per cent marks in her Board exam committed suicide because she didn’t want to study science while her parents wanted her to study nothing else. At the root of this collective perverse behaviour is an education system that is badly out of sync with the real world. The average middle-class Indian parent tends to take pride in the vaunted IITs, and in the toughness of the entrance exams for IITs and IIMs. He looks at the success of Indian IT firms and the fabulous salaries of IIM grads, his chest swells up with patriotism, stars float over his eyes and he turns on his son and, these days, daughter to push the teenager down the path of austere abstinence that alone leads to scholastic success. This is perverse in multiple ways. For one, neither these institutions of learning nor India’s educational system as a whole can claim to be world-class. A recent ranking of the world’s finest universities found that only two from India figured in the top 500, with the higher ranking one kicking in somewhere between 300 and 400. The ranking was done on the basis of fairly objective parameters such as the number of Nobel prizes won by faculty or alumni, citation of articles written by faculty members, etc. India is yet to break out of the ancient Brahmanical scholastic tradition that held that all knowledge has already been discovered and that the seeker’s job was merely to learn what had been laid out in the relevant texts. The system militated against innovation. Only sheer individual brilliance could squeeze out the odd original idea from those wrung out by this system of rote learning. Educational systems around the world have evolved, to encourage innovation and creativity. Students learn to question, not to passively acquiesce in the wisdom handed down by generations. Such system-induced originality lies at the root of not just the higher rankings of the West’s educational institutions but also of their economic success. Mind-numbing conformity is only one problem. Capacity, or its lack, is another. Only around 9per cent of Indians make it to college. There is no reason whatsoever to keep the number of IIT and IIM seats as limited as they are. We need a huge expansion in the intake of students across the board in the tertiary sector of education.