If you could change one thing in Indian Education, what would it be?

FXGalvatron said:
It's 2024 almost and I'm learning about 8085 as well.
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I am not sure - were you expecting to assemble a Lamborghini first day of vehicle production school?
I kind of get your point too - I always used to feel 'why am I learning this' every day in comp science grad course. The solution is simple: If the professor explained in 5 mins how this will be useful in real life, it will take away most of the frustrations.
The microprocessor architecture and the programs I wrote in assembly help me every day writing react, node, go, python code and debugging critical issues. You HAVE to learn addition and subtraction before calculus.
FXGalvatron said:
They just ask me to Google or shout at me for not paying attention to class.
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That's unfortunate. I feel bad for you, getting good teachers needs a lot of luck.
TEUser2K1 said:
Also about supporting e-ink tablets /note taking devices instead of carrying around heavy bags and text books. And many children, especially young girls getting long term health issues from this.
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I kind of disagree. I used to remember a lot of things by writing with pen and paper. Physical books is still my go-to for reading. Could be because I was using them from the beginning?
There is an alternative: Arrange lockers/shelves for everyone so that they don't have to carry classwork notebooks and textbooks. Let them take home what they need.
In my opinion, black(or green)board and chalk is still the best method to teach theory. Actual practicals and experiments will always be better.

Gifted is such a great movie for this - I always feel the things we learn in schools from social interactions have no replacements.
 
@napstersquest
Physical text books do have a tight spatial connection with people, definitely with children who always have to use it.
Another possibility is using a pair of text book, one at school and one at home, so that children don't have to carry it.
Found e-ink display reader devices to be comparatively very comfortable for eyes compared to tablets, so could be used as a standby.

> There is an alternative: Arrange lockers/shelves for everyone so that they don't have to carry classwork notebooks and textbooks. Let them take home what they need.
Good idea, but children missing /misplacing things around lockers are a concern.
Instead of notebooks, in schools papers in folders were suggested, teachers complained that children can't even handle books. They will totally misplace a4 papers. Legit concern.
 
napstersquest said:
I am not sure - were you expecting to assemble a Lamborghini first day of vehicle production school?
I kind of get your point too - I always used to feel 'why am I learning this' every day in comp science grad course. The solution is simple: If the professor explained in 5 mins how this will be useful in real life, it will take away most of the frustrations.
The microprocessor architecture and the programs I wrote in assembly help me every day writing react, node, go, python code and debugging critical issues. You HAVE to learn addition and subtraction before calculus.
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Not exactly per se. I didn't exactly expect something like that but why something not in use was my rationale.
 
Colleges are like pyramid schemes now. Join a college, finish course, no placement, join college as faculty, teach your future replacement. This literally happened to my cousin's cousin. He specialized in BioTech Water management or some such and it had zero/low scope in India some 10~15years back. He ended up being part time faculty teaching the same subject to new students till he quit to do his PhD. Legend has it he's still doing his thesis.
 
FXGalvatron said:
Why though?
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Majority of them are just one building. Students won't even know what day it is. No personality development, no practical teaching. Its just study study studay from 5am till 9pm day in day out. Search 'Sri Chaitanya' and "Narayana" in Andhra/Telangana. They are destroying thousands of kids future year in year out.
 
napstersquest said:
I kind of disagree. I used to remember a lot of things by writing with pen and paper. Physical books is still my go-to for reading. Could be because I was using them from the beginning?
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Not just you, there's reasons for higher efficiency from p/p, mainly that the senses around feeling a real book and the effort that goes into writing on paper (handwriting, revising what you wrote because you forgot, etc etc) beat just reading off a screen. There's studies on this, I reccomend that you look through some of them on google since they compare P/P against Computers pretty nicely.
napstersquest said:
a lot of things by writing with pen and paper. Physical books is still my go-to for reading. Could be because I was using them from the beginning?
There is an alternative: Arrange lockers/shelves for everyone so that they don't have to carry classwork notebooks and textbooks. Let them take home what they need.
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I have lockers in my school - they don't help anybody in any grade. 8 periods in a day, and homework is assigned daily, so I have to carry home at least 8 textbooks and 8 notebooks either way all the way from my house to my class on the 4th floor. Adds up to about 10kg.
napstersquest said:
In my opinion, black(or green)board and chalk is still the best method to teach theory. Actual practicals and experiments will always be better.
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Yes, but you don't need a full paper textbook for experiments. If the main information retention comes from writing on notebooks then notebooks are the only thing you need to carry. An E-reader for all textbooks, and notebooks for all subjects drastically reduces the weight and still allows students to learn well efficiently.
 
enginear said:
Hindi is spoken as an official language
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there is nothing official about Hindi. its just a language.

Think about it; math is the language to explain physics. programming languages like c/c++ are to explain computers and algorithms. Languages should help people to remove barriers not create them.

compare english to telugu, 26 vs 53 alphabet, more than half of the sounds cant be explained in English.
rootyme said:
Learning an extra language is never a waste of effort in my opinion.
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Learning an extra language gives a better perspective.
desiibond said:
Majority of them are just one building. Students won't even know what day it is. No personality development, no practical teaching. Its just study study studay from 5am till 9pm day in day out. Search 'Sri Chaitanya' and "Narayana" in Andhra/Telangana. They are destroying thousands of kids future year in year out.
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I am totally in favor of boarding schools. Personally i am an alumni of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya. Contrary to narayanas and the other iit coaching mills; our school was a 30+ acre campus carved out of 1500 acre HCU campus. If there is any rating for schools, i would put my school on top. My love for computers, my friend circle, my personality etc can be attributed to my life in my school. Best of all; it was all paid by central government lol :cool:
 
Change the students. Need some curiosity in society.

School is about learning how to learn. No one can predict what you will have to learn in the future. Different things are best learnt in different ways. So a sample is given, using which you can draw inspiration when confronted with a new thing to learn in your life.

If someone stopped learning in life after formal education, they are useless anyway.

E.g. learning programming languages is somewhat like learning algebra : solve small, representative problems that cover a wide variety of concepts. Learning newer languages is easier if you read basic text, pronounce poems, listen to the language, write it etc. Why does school have to teach you all the languages you need ? You need Swahili, go learn on your own. You were taught a few languages to figure out how.
dexterz said:
. I was learning about 8085 microprocessors in 2006
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If they directly taught only Core2Duo in 2006 , the single lesson would take 10 years to complete. And give no idea of the context in which it developed.
dexterz said:
I'm still wondering why I spent years trying to learn Laplace and Fourier transform
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Fourier transform is great for any data/signal processing. If a new type of analysis is required in the future, guess who has an advantage: someone who has done one type ( Fourier ) , or someone who has done only what is "required" according to their limited imagination.
FXGalvatron said:
Fun fact. It's 2024 almost and I'm learning about 8085 as well.
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If they teach Alder Lake / Zen 4, the lesson would take 12 years to complete. Not the greatest use of time.
 
kiran6680 said:
If they directly taught only Core2Duo in 2006 , the single lesson would take 10 years to complete. And give no idea of the context in which it developed.

Fourier transform is great for any data/signal processing. If a new type of analysis is required in the future, guess who has an advantage: someone who has done one type ( Fourier ) , or someone who has done only what is "required" according to their limited imagination.
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It would've been good to at least touch base on the latest processors of that time instead of just learning about 80xx/801xx series only. Our way of teaching focuses on teaching the very basics of a lot of things to churn out more generalist without any practical knowledge, not sure if this has changed since I finished college. Very few are lucky enough to stay in the stream they specialize in, rest are relegated to excel and powerpoint.
Teach the basics, but provide practical experience on current scenarios.
 
dexterz said:
at least touch base on the latest processors of that time instead of just learning about 80xx/801xx series only
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Ok, "touch base" is extraordinarily vague. What exactly, with examples, do you want to be taught ? What happened with me in 2002 was:

1. We learnt logic gates
2. Built 8085 using logic gates
3. We were taught 8086 architecture, which is an iteration over 8085
4. Instead of building 8086, we programmed it - on regular 386 / Pentium 1 PCs, using the fact that they were backward compatible with 8086 instructions.

This completes the flow between logic gates and latest processors. The expansion of features, registers, cache, security, instruction sets between 8086 and 386 is left out, but any "engineering" understanding of that topic was too complex to be understood by undergraduate students, not specialising in hardware. That would have cut some other course : which course would you sacrifice for this ?

And engineering colleges are not for writing essays, so non engineering understanding makes no sense. We could have searched in the library, or the new fangled internet if curious. What would you add to the actual curriculum?
 
dexterz said:
It would've been good to at least touch base on the latest processors of that time instead of just learning about 80xx/801xx series only.
Click to expand...
Well, they are the basics which remain more or less than the same. For eg. I recall learning microprocessor programming and assembly language (we did practicals in both) before looking at any of the programming languages. One cannot learn or appreciate English Literature without learning the alphabet and grammar first.
 
Clayfire said:
Cough cough..
Apparently a language being among the 22 official languages recognized under the MHA and the ME and being spoken by 528 million people is not enough to make it an official language?
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now, go and watch this movie...
www.imdb.com

Chupke Chupke (1975) ⭐ 8.3 | Comedy, Drama, Romance

2h 26m | U
www.imdb.com www.imdb.com
 
napstersquest said:
I am not sure - were you expecting to assemble a Lamborghini first day of vehicle production school?
I kind of get your point too - I always used to feel 'why am I learning this' every day in comp science grad course. The solution is simple: If the professor explained in 5 mins how this will be useful in real life, it will take away most of the frustrations.
The microprocessor architecture and the programs I wrote in assembly help me every day writing react, node, go, python code and debugging critical issues. You HAVE to learn addition and subtraction before calculus.

That's unfortunate. I feel bad for you, getting good teachers needs a lot of luck.

I kind of disagree. I used to remember a lot of things by writing with pen and paper. Physical books is still my go-to for reading. Could be because I was using them from the beginning?
There is an alternative: Arrange lockers/shelves for everyone so that they don't have to carry classwork notebooks and textbooks. Let them take home what they need.
In my opinion, black(or green)board and chalk is still the best method to teach theory. Actual practicals and experiments will always be better.

Gifted is such a great movie for this - I always feel the things we learn in schools from social interactions have no replacements.
Click to expand...
On point. It's like saying, it's 2024 and we are still learning about addition and subtraction why don't we start with elliptic curves and undecidability theory? But yeah it's more on teachers to teach 8085 as a building block for what's to come than as a destination of what's to be achieved. Also, add in new chapters to explain how the principles used in 8085 apply to a modern Intel/AMD processor.

Clayfire said:
Cough cough..
Apparently a language being among the 22 official languages recognized under the MHA and the ME and being spoken by 528 million people is not enough to make it an official language?
Click to expand...
I am from the Hindi heartland, and I would not like to imagine India without The Dravidian languages. Do you think declaring one language as India's official/national language is gonna achieve anything, or add anything meaningful to the society? I always see these things coming from people who can't even speak one whole Hindi sentence without using an English or Urdu word. Ask them to recite Hindi Varnmala and the usual excuse "woh to bachpan me padha tha". The same goes for Marathi, Bengali, Maithili, Bhojpuri, etc, and hundreds of dialects of these Indian Languages. Preserve them, love them, and pass them on to the next generation. Your mother tongue is the best thing you pass on to the next generation.
 
@dvader
Fully agree with your viewpoints on languages.
Because of this Hindi enforcement, other language groups are being stifled, not just Dravidian languages.
Tons of knowledge in other languages from non-hindi belt (Odisha, Bengali, Marathi, etc.) itself will soon disappear within a generation or two. Add to that educated people migrating out of the country, especially millionaires in droves.
 
TEUser2K1 said:
@dvader
Fully agree with your viewpoints on languages.
Because of this Hindi enforcement, other language groups are being stifled, not just Dravidian languages.
Tons of knowledge in other languages from non-hindi belt (Odisha, Bengali, Marathi, etc.) itself will soon disappear within a generation or two. Add to that educated people migrating out of the country, especially millionaires in droves.
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Man Indian vernacular languages are under a lot of stress Even Hindi given the modernization and this ever-increasing tilt towards English. Maithili will be extinct in Bihar in a generation. Same with Brijbhasha in west Uttar Pradesh and other dialects and regional languages across India. I have seen people, friends, and family, "Educated People"; feel ashamed when their kids talk in Hindi, (And god forbid if they utter a word of Bhojpuri) at a social gathering. I am a 90s kid and it feels so dystopian to me like it doesn't even feel real. A guy from Patna was once surprised to hear Maithili from another Bihari and asked me what language it was, my jaw dropped in awe; he later commented "Bihar me ye bhasha kab aya". I didn't know whether to laugh, be surprised, feel angry, or be sad........At least major Indian Languages have recognition, support, and have people who can fight for them.... Ladakhi and similar minority languages have an even tougher time.

Anyway, it's like watching a train wreck, you know what's gonna happen, how it's gonna happen but you can't do sh*t. You can just watch it all unfold.........
 
@dvader
> Ladakhi and similar minority languages have an even tougher time.

Very right, tons of indigenous knowledge and stories will be wiped away within a generation or next, at the most.
There needs to be project right now to record and protect those.
That anecdote about Maithili was on to the point.
 
I have a contrarian opinion here: I think only English should be taught in schools. If there is valuable knowledge in the regional language, it might have already been translated into English by now. If not, then most likely the content is not worth translating. The time saved by eliminating regional language subjects should be used to teach life skills such as money management and financial literacy, digital literacy, human anatomy, cooking, mental health, logical fallacies, and ways to filter fake news and information, among others. Other subjects are essential and cannot be removed.
 
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