The race to build
a world of better education, few places compare with India for the
scale
of the challenge and the ambition. The PM of India has recently highlighted the
problem of
India’s “acute skills shortage”, and how this is hampering the pace of
economic growth and undermining international competitiveness.
There
are a number of reasons for this. Traditional rote-learning, for
centuries the teaching style of choice, where students regurgitate
knowledge,
is increasingly out of sync with workplaces that value emotional
intelligence and interpersonal skills. Team-building, conflict
resolution, empathy, leadership, and resilience – this is the stuff of
the successful 21st century worker; but it is not the stuff
that schools are sufficiently good at teaching.
The Pearson India reported in annual Voice of the Teacher survey that 57% of Indian teachers consider their students insufficiently prepared for employment on completing school.
Three quarters of teachers want greater industry input into course content – a theme that has to be heard loud and clear.
Yet
the infrastructure is there to make big improvements. Technology lets
us learn what we want, when we want, at the pace we want. It can give us
instant feedback and tell us where an individual – I – am going wrong
and what I need to do to progress.
And most importantly of all, it can do this for billions more people
than the traditional classroom can. Not just access to learning - but
also progress.
This
skills challenge is not one of those great, intractable global issues.
Solutions shouldn’t be hard to come by. It will require closer
collaboration
between educators, and employers. Nobody knows better than employers
what sort of skills are needed for the workforce, and nobody knows
better than teachers how to impart these skills onto young people. Governments need to put in place structures and
incentives which encourage this collaboration.
The Free
market forces and government policies may determine unemployment
levels, but with the right education, nobody ever need be unemployable.
India needs to continue to think outside the box when it comes to skill enhancing the population.
Get
it right, and we all win: the school leaver gets the job, businesses
get their talent, and a nation continues to lift itself up.
