Why hasn't the education system evolved to meet current demands?

"Soon there'll be an engineer in every house". This is a line from a Bollywood movie. I am having a hard time recalling what movie it was from, but the line has become a core memory.

I was talking to my childhood friend Hameed last night, who has a Ph.D. in petroleum engineering, and somehow we ended up talking about his younger brother. Now you see, Hameed who has a Ph.D. ended up being jobless for almost 2 years after completing his education while his younger brother became the main breadwinner in the house of 7 even before finishing college.

Hameed was an A* student, and his younger brother barely made it through school and to date hasn't graduated from his college. It didn't take long before I was discussing all the different successful people both he and I have come across in our lives who lived a similar life to Hameed's younger brother.

Until 8th grade, I studied in the CBSE educational system. Day in and out it was always about cramming. We called it "ratta": the act of mindlessly memorizing every bit of information and regurgitating it on a piece of paper. By 7th grade I realized I wasn't truly learning anything useful, I was simply memorizing things. The next year I moved to the British educational board Edexcel. It was very expensive for us at the time, but I was content.

Edexcel was more hands-on. In CBSE the longer your answer was the better. In Edexcel, it was different in the way that you had to understand the concept instead of simply memorizing giant paragraphs. They weren't vastly different. Both the boards demanded cramming and regurgitation with no real lessons that would help in becoming a better member of society. However, Edexcel turned out to be a little less linear and more cocurricular than CBSE.

But the fact remains, the educational system has still not evolved drastically at all. CBSE, Edexcel, or what have you.

Look at Japan. They don't have exams for the first few years of schooling and focus on instilling good manners and excellent behaviors in children. Some schools in the UAE have been trying to install the same system because it is a good thing to nourish the child's mentality before saturating it with information that needs to be crammed.

India has created the highest number of paper engineers and doctors. The same can be seen in Bangladesh. A strong push by parents to make their children an engineer or a doctor. So much so that China has the largest number of med schools in the world. You guessed it, most of them are not recognized by the WHO or even affiliated to any licensing board. One of the students from China I helped get admission in Ukraine told me the universities there are just as plenty as groceries.

Back in the day, being a doctor or an engineer was a special achievement. The salary and lifestyle came with it. Those professions demand cramming. But still, they also demand a very open mind and high creativity to tackle problems efficiently.

Cramming info to obtain concrete fundamental knowledge about the field is important in any science. However, there are just so many job positions for doctors and engineers. Hence we see a doctor riding a rickshaw in Bangladesh and an engineer working in a textile shop in India to make ends meet.

But what if the social pressure didn't exist in those countries? What if the educational system was more flexible? We would see more artists, more bankers, more creative directors, more architects, more coders, etc., who would excel in their fields and specialize in them while not struggling to ace in school.

Let's be honest, grades have become secondary. Nowadays experience matters. Every place you go they ask you about your experience and life skills before they ask you your grades (if they even do). Even to get into a hospital in the UAE as a GP they ask about your experiences before they as about your grades.

The simple fact is the days of having straight-cut jobs in society are long over. The need for getting excellent grades by cramming and regurgitating to land those straight-cut jobs is over. It took less than 60 years between inventing the plane and sending the first man to space. Times are changing fast. What worked in the '50s cannot and will not work today.

We still have the same syllabus. We still have the same system. Schools now throw in an iPad and a laptop at our students and call it "advanced education". We need to focus more on developing the creativity of students and pushing them towards being more innovative to satiate the demands of the fast-growing world.

As an institute of knowledge and building the future, it is the school's responsibility to find ways of bringing appropriate changes to the schooling system and educating the parents just as much as educating the children.

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