Why should we disrupt the current system of education?

Why Should We Disrupt the Current System of Education?

Disruption is not a word that is usually liked by many people. Unfortunately, it is considered by many as a destructive process, a process that challenges the existential dynamics. Many consider this as an aggressive assault on the comfort zone in which a system operates. However, in modern times, disruption has become a word that helps to reorganize or re-engineer a system. It is expected to pump more dopamine into the system to make it more creative, innovative, and enterprising. “Disruptive thinkers” are invited to participate in many discussions to introspect and investigate systems to set them in order.

“Disruption is a break, an intervention, a disorder, a deviation to a routine continuous system or a process, a thought or a dynamic – that brings about a change, a transformation, an innovation, a re-engineering or a re-structuring of the existing state.”
It brings about a change in the existential dynamics including thought, style, approach, objective, target, or the outcome of a system.

Disruptive thinking, as described by Luke Williams (2011) in his book Disrupt, is a way of thinking that involves generating unexpected and innovative solutions that challenge the status quo and have the potential to disrupt markets or industries.

Why Should We Disrupt Education?

Education has long been the most powerful instrument of nurturing human intellect, knowledge systems, thought architectures, and socio-emotional constructs. It facilitates and impacts human development, socio-cultural sensitivities, and productive engagement with the environment.

For centuries, education has helped the powers that govern to use its instruments as a tool for developing either democratic or polarized thought systems that could be navigated according to the whims of the leaders who govern. Consequently, the systems have stayed rigid, conservative, and formal, giving fewer opportunities for engaging with free thinking and immense opportunities for more critical thinking, enabling innovation, enterprise, and productivity.

What Are the Reasons That Call for Disruptive Thinking About Education?

1. Linearity in Educational Thought and Delivery Systems
The desire of the foreign rulers in India to impact native thinking to make it more aligned to their own social structures, cultural spectrum, and workstations made them design an educational model that would be subservient and fulfill the needs of their governance rather than stay engaged with the successful facilitation of the needs of the native land.

The post-independent India stayed comfortably with the same strait-jacketed system which facilitated skilled and semi-skilled persons to suit the industrial model, thus empowering a mass education system. The model offered the least support to creative thinking, innovation, and independent excellence. The system encouraged more rote learning, and the same has stayed far too long despite innumerable changes that have taken place.

2. Inadequate Skill Development
Though the objective of the educational process was to develop skilled personnel, the focus stayed aligned largely to fundamental skills. The skill courses did not adequately update themselves to meet the emerging needs and changes in technology. The skills lacked pragmatism and hence even qualified persons needed upskilling and re-skilling.

Though the Government has addressed these issues with purpose and positivity, the system did not respond adequately. The inferior status offered to many of these skilled courses distanced competent learners from making different choices to keep the profile of their status. The mismatch between Industry 4.0 and Education 2.0 is well recognized, yet least addressed. No wonder, this puts a case for disruption in education.

3. Top-down Approach
The overwhelming governmental domination in education encouraged a normalized straight-jacketed approach to education with the mistaken idea of “one size fits all.” Given the fact that the country has a wide spectrum of learners with different language inputs, differing geographies, varied social strata with economic inequities, and cultural variances, the educational system demanded a more broad-based, accommodative approach to be more inclusive to the needs of the people.

The top-down approach both to policy making and curriculum design discouraged local participation as well as free intercourse between geographies to encourage the free flow of thoughts and experiences. The environment needs to change.

4. Challenges of Socio-economic Inequities
Education, being a basic need for all the citizens of the country, needs to be set as a priority. However, the compulsions of the deficit economy of a growing country set other preferences, leaving education as a lesser priority. Expenditure in education was not adequate to meet the large demands of social structures.

Further, the poor administration of these structures, alongside the latent corruptive practices, were hindrances to structural improvements both in the rural sector as well as the institutions of higher learning which needed huge support for their research and development projects. The per-capita investment in education was low. The participation of the private sector did help in annulling the situation by bringing a certain measurable amount of quality participation; yet the business models restrained mobility from linear structures by failing to invest in empowerment as well as research.

5. Non-availability of Freedom of Choice
Most of the institutional processes gave packed learning modules, leaving inadequate freedom of choice in choosing disciplines of learning. The learners were forced to take their further studies based on the availability of courses rather than their own choices.

The admission to higher courses of learning was based on the performances in their previous years and hence not linked to the aptitudes of learners. Marketing dynamics listed the courses based on market choices rather than futuristic needs. The absence of synergy between the learning discipline and their own preferences and aptitudes produced learners who were essentially mediocre and had no sense of passion or enterprise for what they have learned.

6. The Assessment Models
Though significant changes were brought into the administrative structure of the assessment models, they failed to identify the real interest, aptitude, and skills of the learners in any subject. Thus, the wide gap between the reflections of performance in certified documents and their essential individual skills was quite discouraging.

The marks were neither credible nor reflective of their competence. Knowledge-based assessments isolating pragmatic physical engagements with learning situations yielded more unemployable learners.

Why Disrupting Education Is the Need of the Hour

To set aside these inadequacies and challenges and to put the educational process in place to be relevant, to be current, and to be futuristic, a disruption in the educational process is essential. The claim that the new National Education Policy has taken cognizance of these issues is no best bet as a remedy for the ongoing illness.

What Should Disrupting Education Achieve?

1. It should act as a cure and remedy for the illness of the current educational processes.

2. Disruption should lead to a transformation and an organic change in the way we think about education.

3. Disruption should lead to a value enrichment of all the components of the educational process and its systemic associates.

4. Disruption should be an interventional surgery to eliminate the corrupt practices haunting quality in education.

5. Disruption should help in pumping more energy into the system to ensure the process stays current, relevant, creative, and innovative.

Disruption in education should facilitate more freedom to learn, more gateways to learning opportunities, more learning-centric educational processes, and more inputs for self-learning and self-directed learning. For a country like Bharath, with a huge learning population, the future of the country depends largely on the way the younger generations stand educated.