On Thursday 07 Oct 2010 8:49:01 pm Mahesh Murthy wrote: > Perhaps it's also time to get off the engineering and medical fixation. > That is so 1960s/1970s/1980s. All of us perhaps came from that background. > I posit that very few of our children (and perhaps we can do a quick > audit) are following in our footsteps. > No Mahesh. You have got it wrong.
It's not you or me who are fixated with medicine and engineering. It's the curricula of school boards and a huge number of Indian parents. Even back in the 1960s choices other than medcine and engineering were available. It's just that those two were pushed as safe and reliable choices. And my own peers who did not do medicine or engineering are doing perfectly well. Today that choices are even wider for a child. A child can safely give up or not opt for medicine or engineering. I agree with you here. The choices are there. You have not understod what I am trying to say, or else we have to agree to disagree. But most people are unaware of the choices, and what is worse is that school systems do not help parents and children with opting out of science and math by allowing a child to develop skills like art or music before being forced to choose a college education. When a child finishes school in India he has invariably passed an exam in science, math and language and little else. The demands of those 3 subjects have been made so rigorous that the child has had no time to develop alternative skills or interests. The fact that alternative skills and interests could lead to careers is not revealed in any meaningful way by most schools who are scrambling to perpare their children for the math and science requirements. And schoolds do that because the education board curriculum itself is skewed to demand that science and math are mandatorily taught to a high enough standard to enable a child to enter a medicine or engineering course. Nothing is done to equip children to do music, art, history, law, catering or specific branches of science or combinations of say computers and music. Indian children don't even figure out that there can be a futre in any of those things. And the schools and curriculum are to blame. Furthemore I think you have misinterpreteed the news item of the engineering seats that are not taken. Those seats have not been taken because of over capacity. That overcapacity was created because of a mad rush for medicine and engineering. What India is doing is making engineers and doctors out of people who would be much better off doing something else. But those doctors and engineers were never informed of the choices thay had before they jumped in. That is still happening in India. You were lucky enough to opt out but people are still geting fooled by the system. Perhaps you have not found out yet. shiv
