A student’s lifecycle from the formative schooling years through the explorative college days is one of the key success factors for India that aspires to be Viksit Bharat @ 2047. Resting on the sinews of its education system to shape the professional trajectories of youthful millions needing enlightenment to be employable or entrepreneurial, there is telling visibility to confront the hurdling realities with candour & purpose. The two banks of the knowledge river—school & higher education is unbridged with systemic dissonance endured with disjunctions. Time has come for an integrative approach that cements school & higher education to build a strong foundation on which the tall dreams of higher education can be built.
The sweeping takeover by the coaching class ecosystem and the multiple entrance exam market economy has reduced school students into humanoids paraded as “exam-cracking automatons.” Such an overwhelming preoccupation that clouds purpose has endangered a culture where entrance exam marks eclipse the meaning of schooling. The fictitious market capitalisation of the coaching class companies and their hyper-dramatic commoditisation of exam coaching has made school education a cerebral surgical strike when it is supposed to enrich cerebral curiosity. Such administrative & policy incongruities shaping market thoughts and action are demolishing the very scaffolds on which intellectual human capital needs to be built. With Artificial Intelligence (AI) promising the stars and gullible youth chasing them as intellectual paratroopers, the foot soldiers of knowledge economy become victims of a competitive academic war when they enter higher education.
When students who are conditioned to chase scores with robotic precision sacrificing intellectual curiosity at the altars of JEE, NEET and other avoidable private university ‘entrance exams’ enter the orbit of higher education they fail to traverse the journey with confidence. The higher education pathway is a navigational exercise that demands independent thought and conceptual depth which is a shocking in-absentia for the majority entering this important phase. This predicament is further exacerbated by the conspicuous paucity of opportunities for creative expression in schools which are either coaching class controlled theatres of MCQ mania or stigmatised stereotypes of a rigid syllabi, prescriptive answers and time-bound assessments. When vital signals of school learning outcomes are weak due to such alarming levels of under nourishment with overly charged school fees, which is king’s ransom in many cases, higher education institutions (HEIs) are forced to grapple with learners who are hesitant to question, imagine or innovate. Be that is it may, universities and HEIs are at crucial cross roads sandwiched between automated schooling objectives and animated industry expectations.
Universities are now undertaking the arduous task of dismantling these ingrained habits before fostering higher-order cognitive abilities resulting in conflict of priorities. As such universities have their own laundry list of problems plagued with unmanageable heterogeneity with unrealistic demands of a system that treats the 3Ps—(p)ranking, placements & publications with paramount importance. There are exceptional outliers to this, but a vast majority are still chartering in turbulence territories of unequal contours and vantage points. The absence of coherence at the foundational level thus reverberates across the entire educational continuum.
The contemporary socio-economic milieu demands agility, creativity, communication, and technological fluency. However, given that these competencies are insufficiently cultivated during school years, universities are compelled to compress skill development into a truncated timeframe. This often results in an aspirational yet imperfect attempt to bridge the employability gap, sometimes privileging short-term training over enduring understanding. Can this be addressed to begin with in a small way before scaling to create multiplier effect?
The concerning disconnect between the School Education & Teacher Education policy ecosystem can be remedied by creating school education zones inside university campuses with a blanket approval to Top 100 NIRF universities to start schools within their campuses. These schools become the laboratories for the university’s integrated teacher education programmes (ITEPs) promoting an osmotic school-higher education flow of skills. Such universities must be granted approval by the NCTE to start ITEPs for if teacher educators are not trained in contemporary pedagogical practices in the school grounds of learning, the never ending cycle of rote learning and limited skill development shall limitlessly perpetuate creating a feedback loop that is difficult to disrupt. Breaking the discrete silos to promote interdependent components of a unified school & higher-ed ecosystem, teachers and faculty must evolve as co-creators of a cohesive learning journey to ensure that education transcends fragmentation and becomes a continuum of intellectual growth.
As coaching classes begin to invade regular schools, schools must evade them by relocating themselves in thought and action inside university campuses. In short: Uni-schools need to enrich intellectual unicorns.