Here is why your Board marks don’t matter and how you have been fooled all your life…
I will not explain what’s wrong with the education system- the education system explains that itself. The reason why you should not care about the education system in India is because the education system never cared about you!
Our education system was designed by the British almost 200 years ago who needed clerks to manage their territories, army men to protect their territories and factory workers. The basic qualities for either of the above three jobs are- lack of creativity, following orders, not questioning the authority and listening to instructions.
The story goes that the British had a few extra pounds (which they had probably extracted from us) to spend on “the intellectual improvement of India”. They appointed T. Macaulay to help them decide how the money should be “invested”.
- Macaulay, who gave the blueprint of the current education system, while giving a speech in the British parliament on the 2nd of February, 1835, rather (in)famously remarked, “ We need to teach Indians English. If we do not teach them English, they will waste their life touching a cow.”
Not just that, here are some excerpts from that speech which completely exposes the so-called father of Indian education system –
“… a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India”
“ the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, no valuable work can be translated from them”
“ …the superiority of Europeans (when compared to Indian scientific knowledge) becomes absolutely immeasurable”
“I would at once stop the printing of Sanskrit and Arabic books. I would abolish the Madrassa and the Sanskrit College at Calcutta.”
Mr. Macaulay went on to mock sacred works in Sanskrit and Arabic by deeming them to be of “small intrinsic value” and that they portrayed “false religion, and false history”.
At that time, Sanskrit scholars were given a stipend by the government to study Sanskrit whereas English scholars had to be given no such stipend. Instead, the English scholars paid the government for their education. Hence it was profitable for the empire that every Indian studies English, not Sanskrit or Arabic.
Henceforth, the British stopped giving any stipend or any other form of encouragement to Eastern languages and eastern knowledge. They devised a system which was completely alien to Indians. They wanted to ingrain western philosophy in the minds of Indians. They wanted Indians to think the way the British wanted them to.
Hence this system which alienates Indians from Eastern philosophy, which asks them to not question anything and follow blindly has become the basis of modern Indian schools.
Ergo, the Board results are not a report card of the knowledge which you have gained , but only a report on how well you can take instructions without questioning, how well you can follow orders or how Macaulay had put it- how well you can become an “ Indian in flesh and blood but English in taste”!
Congratulations if you are more than 90% British! (like me :D)