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By Nandini Garg : Our basic model of public schooling — accepting raw material in the form of five-year-olds, and then adding value through a series of processing steps to produce educated graduates 12 (or more) years later — reflects the vision of the old industrial economy. This worked well in an earlier era, but improvements that might have kept this model up to date have been stalled for decades.

A Modern Indian Classroom – Photo Credit : indianschool.com

We now need a new vision for schools that looks a lot more like Silicon Valley than Detroit: decentralized, entrepreneurial, and flexible. Our once unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being over taken by competitors throughout the world. This rote-learning is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds Indian prosperity, security, and civility…. For a generation, many on the right have argued for school choice — especially through the use of vouchers — as the primary means of achieving this vision.

Their approach, however, has been both too doctrinaire and too artificial. If school choice ever becomes more than tinker-toy demonstration projects, taxpayers will appropriately demand that a range of controls and requirements be imposed on the schools they are ultimately funding. At that point, what would be the difference between such “private” schools and “public” schools that were allowed greater flexibility in hiring, curriculum, and student acceptance, and had to compete for students in order to capture funding? We should pursue the creation of a real marketplace among ever more deregulated publicly financed schools — a market in which funding follows students, and far broader discretion is permitted to those who actually teach and manage in our schools.

There are real-world examples of such systems that work well today — both Sweden and the Netherlands, for instance, have implemented this kind of plan at the national level. The Indian education system is supposed to be a pipeline that prepares children in elementary and secondary school to pursue opportunities in post-secondary education and in the workforce. It is well known that this pipeline is leaky–that millions of children pass through their K-12 years without receiving a quality education.

Too many students drop out and, all too often, those who do earn a high school degree lack the academic qualifications to succeed in STEM fields in college or in the workforce. Improving learning in education should remain a priority for policymakers. For students, succeeding in K-12 classes will open the door to future opportunities in higher education, and in the workforce. Also, ensuring that the next generation of Indian workers has adequate skills and training in critical areas is vital to India’s national security and economic competitiveness. If India lacks the tools to combat aggressors its future is at risk.

Wars are won partly with superior technologies–and India’s survival depends on its ability to maintain an advantage over its enemies. Indian scientists and engineers work every day to develop new tools to protect it from terrorism, such as lasers and explosives-detection devices. Tackling pressing global problems–from energy security to vulnerable cyber infrastructure–will require the intellectual curiosity and creativity of educated individuals. Our nation is at risk.

What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments….????? If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on India the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war…

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