Thursday, September 29, 2011

where are india's scholastic achievements? nowhere, as the neros fiddle and delhi burns.

sep 28th, 2011 CE

http://www.economist.com/node/21529014

look at the chinese students' scores, and weep.

india lost out first by ignoring primary education and thus creating generations of ill-equipped factory labor; now it is losing by ignoring tertiary education and forfeiting a chance at the knowledge economy.

the worst is in the all-important humanities, where india's presence is basically nil. at least in the applied sciences there are a few decent universities. pure sciences suck, too. 

and the sad thing is that humanities are the key; technical solutions are merely appendages to policy matters. 

2 comments:

Pagan said...

Our current system exaggerates the importance of English. We plant the idea that education is all about imbibing foreign ideas and thus kill originality:

..the old orthodox man may be ignorant, he may be crude, but he is a man, he has a faith, he has strength, he stands on his own feet; while the Europeanised man has no backbone, he is a mass of heterogeneous ideas picked up at random from every source — and these ideas are unassimilated, undigested, unharmonised. He does not stand on his own feet, and his head is turning round and round. Where is the motive power of his work? — in a few patronizing pats from the English people. His schemes of reforms, his vehement vituperations against the evils of certain social customs, have, as the mainspring, some European patronage. Why are some of our customs called evils? Because the Europeans say so. That is about the reason he gives. I would not submit to that. Stand and die in your own strength, if there is any sin in the world, it is weakness; avoid all weakness, for weakness is sin, weakness is death. These unbalanced creatures are not yet formed into distinct personalities;

Arvind said...

i disagree with you. we need to do away with all formal education systems. they are all nonsense in every country. chinese know to game the system and score well in tests. this means nothing.

in the west, universities exist for one and only one purpose - to feed off the system. this is where the good for nothing white women end up.

universities are affirmative action programs for white people. that is why they have subjects such as women's studies, gender studies, economics and journalism. even in science and engineering, they just fit some curve to data and award phds. most phds are nonsense.

do you know the reason for the london race riots? whites leech off the system through universities and other grants and blacks do not know to do this kind of sophisticated cheating. this is the reason for the inequality in the west. although blacks have not figured out the exact reason for the inequality, they feel frustrated that there is a system that leaves them out.

india needs to stop copying the west. there is no sanctity in the so-called education system. india's system of private tuitions and vocational training institutes such as niit puts it far ahead of china or usa. i would rather hire someone who has been to niit and has some skills than some phd in gender studies from harvard.