The Pressure Cooker of India: The Educational System

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The Pressure Cooker of India:  The Educational System



The pressure cooker is one of the most widely used cooking equipment in the kitchen. It is used to make those hard potatoes soft and the delicate tomatoes mushy. Listening to some of the students in schools and colleges and based on my own school experience, I realized that our own educational system has become a brand new pressure cooker.

To fix this perpetual problem, the government tried to make it easy for the students but made a bigger mess of it. By letting the students pass, even if they do not meet the required standards, right up to the 10th grade had seemed like a bright solution to the problem however it ended up producing a bunch of dimwits who take no interest in their studies. Now, I am not fully an enemy to both methods of education but I do feel that we require a little more wisdom. Instead of moving between two extremes, it is better to stick to the point of equivalence, or as Blaise Pascal would term it ‘the middle path’. In between the two extremes of rote memory and academic indifference, one needs to move towards assimilation. Assimilated knowledge forms a person whereas the two extremes produce either robots or slackers.

The movement to assimilation is time-consuming. It may take a little longer to imbibe the things to be learnt. It may even seem like a waste of time. But, the fruit at the end is much sweeter than otherwise. This ‘pressure cooker’ system of education led students to purely memorize for a specific time stretch. This ‘pressure’ in the cooker rose higher than the optimum thus ‘overcooking’ the student’s mind. The method of assimilation does put a tinge of pressure on the student but also gives the student’s mind to work at its optimum. It lays less stress on the mind but gives it enough time to learn what is taught and apply it to life so as to be remembered for life.

Education in India, for decades, has focused on stuffing much information on the young people’s minds. The focus has deviated from life-enriching lessons to purely academic work. It is true that we have to know a lot because of the fast developing world around us. But, education was meant to bring the best out of the student and not to force down information. One needs to focus on training the young minds to be good, honest and humane citizens rather than programming them to be heartless robots. I hope that in the coming years there will be some sort of a revolution in the education systems. I hope that the younger generations become more humane rather than turn into 'machinery in flesh’. And, for those students who are gearing up for their term papers, HSC and SSC examinations it is strongly recommended to focus on assimilating what you have learnt so that you could apply it to life.

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