DailyPost 2179
COACHING AND THE NEMESIS OF EDUCATION
Coaching has not only meant the nemesis of education, it has the same impact on learning, the spirit of enquiry, the capability to collate and create your own narrative, creativity, capability to handle academic stress and crisis and capability to race against time and deliver. It has meant the end of professionalism to a considerable degree, as a spoon-fed person would take a long time to break the shackles and create a professional out of such a person. The coaching institute is the overall camouflage for the student / candidate, a failure can certainly be attributed to it. Parents absolve themselves of their responsibility too. NCERT books are being taught for graduates and post graduates, is also coaching.
Modelling in the thumbnail style you can see in all coaching centre advertisements post the declaration of any competitive exam results. Quite a few times you find the same faces on the ads of few of these shops. Even if you do a test series or get some reading material from any of these shops, and you clear the exam, you get wedded to them for good. Not that coaching was not there earlier, but Kota established to the level of a Maggi, if I may so. It made it into a quintessential for a student’s existence, otherwise the student remains incomplete and would be fit for nothing. Kota brought commercialisation to education as nothing else in India’s education history.
The system, mode, dwelling and monetization was so radically different from the normal educational system had ever seen. Yet it took over the county as fish takes to water. The Kota model is here to stay. Schools slowly absolved themselves of the child’s performance in a competitive exam. It was meant for boards and boards are not meant for anybody. What a tragedy? The impact of commercialisation of school education and the crash commercialisation of coaching has meant the nemesis of education. While students score centum after centum in the board exams, the qualifying percentage is currently hovering at 20% or so for the cut-throat competitive exams in the country.
With the coming of CUET nearly all entry to higher educational institutions through national level competitive exams seems to be complete. What should be a student’s emphasis has been made amply clear to him. What is the purpose of board exams in the first place? Secondly, if the schools cannot equip them for competitive exams which are meant for students of that prescribed level, then why have schools at all. It has been the most silent coup of our times. Where the best equipped schools and colleges fail, there Kota, Mukherjee Nagar and Karolbagh deliver. Or a fake world is created? Both demand and supply. After NEET now its CUET, by next year a new coaching industry will evolve around it. Can schools really not prepare students for college; technical and otherwise, then why should they be called schools in the first place.
WE ARE AT THE VERGE OF LOSING WHAT OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM STOOD FOR & DELIVERED, TO THE FAMED KOTA MODEL.
Sanjay Sahay