DailyPost 2519
IIT KOTA – A CONDUIT TO A BETTER WORLD OR?
Kota does not have an IIT but is the best-known city for IITs. With the number of suicides reported from that city this year, everything does not seem to be hunky-dory. Is it symptomatic of much bigger issues, generally pushed under the carpet. Is IIT enabled Kota a conduit to better world, cracking an exam promises of much better world or is it a poster boy of India’s educational malaise. Whatever it may be, Kota is at the vortex and whole country is submerged in it. IIT JEE coaching has established itself as biggest money spinner is education business, sustained over a long time.
It is a part of a well establishment ecosystem, each feeding into the other, knowingly or unknowingly, deliberately or otherwise, making commercial gains out of it or just being a bystander. Does Kota make money out of IIT business compared to the combined annual fees of all IITs? Or does it churn out more money compared to the whole schooling system of the nation? For sure it would be generating more revenue compared to all Central Schools and other such top levels schools of the government. How many IITs can be established out the turnover of IIT coaching of one year? The first and foremost, why this exam is needed in the first place?
CBSE conducts the 12th exam and IIT JEE is also conducted by a government agency. Why should there be a wide gap between the syllabus of the two. If 12th class is the qualifying exam for IIT JEE, any student coming out of our schooling should be competent enough to take that exam confidently, without the need of an intervening system called professional commercial coaching. The knowledge chasm between the two exams is the killer and nothing has been done to bridge it for ages. If our schooling system becomes so qualitative and validated by 12th class exam from a professional engineering college entry point of view, then what is the need for a different exam. The CBSE exams results should suffice.
Another question emanates out of this is the way students are going through the CBSE education machine and way they are marked. This is besides the curriculum issue. The schools have caved in and that lost their relevance in the senior classes when you are approaching senior secondary exam. They had aligned with the coaching centers, rather than the other way round. The schools are playing a second fiddle, to the extent that dummy schools provide fullest support to these coaching centers to get board certificates. First there should be no need for coaching and if required why can’t it be provided by the school teachers. Today, coaching business has become a dinosaur, on the verge of finishing schooling and all what schools stood for. What support they got from the ecosystem, the less said the better. The environment of coaching institutions vs what the child requires between ages 15 to 18 are two different worlds. This rot needs to be stemmed to bring sanity into our schooling system and also of most of the lot getting into IITs.
COACHING IS AN ANTITHESIS TO ALL WHAT GOOD SCHOOLING SHOULD STAND FOR.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.