Quotes of the day: on teachers and education in India

Where have all these teachers gone today?

Real teachers simply do not exist. We as a nation erased the framework and the climate to create good teachers. In our hurry to become a superpower, we forgot the elementary. We started first with creating engineers, followed by doctors. Then we created ‘tech coolies' and ‘nurses'. Then we created an army of generalists who claim to be educated, have paper degrees and could easily take up any of the service sector jobs — ranging from being an ‘officer' in a corporate to the ‘fast moving' retail sector to the financial services sector.

Teachers, along with other nation-building professionals, fell by the wayside. 

The entire opinion piece here.

As for the drive to generate engineers, well, to use Dr. Phil's language, "how's that workin' for you?"  Here is one about Kerala, and from what I have read and heard, this is not unique to one state, but is a country-wide issue:

[Nearly] one-third of the students enrolled in many of these private self-financing engineering colleges end up never taking the university degree — they remain Bachelor divorced from Technology (for life). Those without even the basic mathematical sense succeed in sneaking into some of the private self-financing engineering institutions, only to fail all the way accumulating back papers semester after semester. Certainly, the money their parents dish out, by way of loans, nay mortgage, contribute to the overall liquidity and provides employment and business opportunities to many. Beyond that social function, what becomes of the family from which the forlorn student hails is the moot question. 

Simply awful :(

All the more the reasons why increasingly Indians are frustrated with the current situation, and are even tempted to turn to the likes of the fascist Narendra Modi for leadership and a government that can deliver, even if that potentially means infringements on freedoms.

Because, as China, Singapore, South Korea, and the likes have demonstrated, those countries have surged way ahead of India, whose only claim seems to be its "democracy." 

How I wish I could somehow force these opinion essays down the throat (metaphorically speaking, of course!) of the author of that one hell of a stupid op-ed on the "better" education system in India!