India is an interesting place at the moment and the pressure to succeed is immense (often to the detriment of personal wellbeing). So much so that cheating schemes are commonly devised by large groups of people, and the ingenuity involved is often quite remarkable and creative.
I've personally hired a number of people in my Delhi office from the local IIT, and these are a few things I've noticed amongst new grads: parrot fashion learning is rife across the board. Despite being smart, they often struggle to think on their feet. It's as if they want a fully defined a problem domain, AND want to solve problems only within that defined domain, much like an exam! Anything outside of their comfort zone is met with a rather damp response equating to "we haven't covered that in class yet". In business (and even development), that attitude is not a good one to have.
What's funny, however, is that if you walk past an Indian shanty town, you will find examples of (often illegal) innovation at every corner, from stolen electricty to rigged water meters etc - usually concocted by people with little education. The innovative mindset exists in the heart of Indian society, but the education system somehow seems to restrict it by making people believe that the path to success is narrow and the same for everyone. Hence the competition.
I feel the education system needs to encourage free thinking more than rote learning. I believe it would allow students to enjoy their subjects, rather than just looking at them as a stepping stone to success. Perhaps if students approached their studies with a sense of wonder and excitement, rather than competetive aggression, their mental state would be significantly better during their years of education.
Without a doubt all the years of exam preparation in the teenage years come at a steep cost. For a young person in their teens to not have the time to reflect, be self-aware, and explore what life has to offer, is necessarily a failure of the system as a whole. But that is the reality in India, and if students must trade all that for studying hard then it simply reflects their (I would argue correct) perspective on the potential rewards of a solid career and securing your future from the certain chaos that awaits the uneducated or even poorly performing students in India.
In that sense I would say it is unfair to claim that Indian students graduating from an IIT can't do this or that; it is actually an achievement in and of itself that they managed to get there and out without turning out to be entirely dysfunctional. While I would not argue that competition in India (in the context of these national examinations) is much higher than the competition in the West in various spheres (sports, sciences, tech, etc.), the reality is that the breadth of options to a good place in life is extremely limited, and the competition is rather concentrated to a few possibilities. You cannot opt to become a YouTuber, pro basketball player or a digital nomad if you're born Indian. There is essentially a bunch of careers in science, engineering and medicine, and a few top institutions for each of these ends, whose pedigree can get you very far, and failing that, there is much uncertainty to be faced. And most Indian students, while unable to articulate this, clearly feel these pressures and act accordingly.
I think you make a good point. The only issue, an important one at that, which I have is the last statement: "And most Indian students, while unable to articulate this, clearly feel these pressures and act accordingly."
Students are younger and much more curious about the world and about what to make of their lives. I would argue its the parents that feel these pressures and transfer that onto their kids. And I don't believe it is simply to give them a good livelihood: both rich and poor parents want their kids to get into these elite institutions. And that is a huge problem.
I grew up in India. While I lucked out that I was naturally inclined to find science and math interesting, a lot of the people I went to college with found it absolutely boring and even torturous to go through their coursework, which was deeply saddening for me personally. I would ask them why they did it if they wanted to do other things? Usually the answer would be because their parents wanted them to be an engineer.
No one in any country can really opt to be a YouTuber or pro basketball player. I mean a few people manage to do it through a combination of talent, luck, and hard work but they're so few as to be statistically insignificant from a career planning standpoint. On average US and Indian high school students have approximately the same chance of becoming an NBA player: ≈0%.
For a young person in their teens to not have the time to reflect, be self-aware, and explore what life has to offer, is necessarily a failure of the system as a whole. But that is the reality in India, and if students must trade all that for studying hard then it simply reflects their (I would argue correct) perspective on the potential rewards of a solid career and securing your future from the certain chaos that awaits the uneducated or even poorly performing students in India.
The degree to which your sentences contradict each other seems remarkable to me. Surely, the student who relentlessly prepare for these exams also don't have time to reflect on whether or not their activity is worth it and so X being "simply their perspective" seems meaningless. Similarly, it would seem to be a failing of the system that there is no other path to success here.
You claimed a contradiction but didn't present it. And you go on to assert exactly the things that I said. I am saying that the system failed the students by forcing them to prepare relentlessly for these exams, which the students come to realize is really the only path to success, robbing them of some of the aspects of a normal childhood.
If the system / economy were capable of providing a more varied set of jobs like acting opportunities, regular gigs for bands, apprenticeships in various blue collar jobs, etc. then people will be able to choose professions that better match their interests and skill sets. Why force someone who likes to work with wood into a degree in engineering or science. This is largely what is happening in India.
I am not saying that there are no actors or bands or bike mechanics in India. Rather, it is assumed that everyone needs a degree from college and even if this is an entirely ridiculous proposition for many people (based on their interests) and they endure four years in college doing something they don't enjoy in some of the formative years of their life.
So the people who might have benefited from an apprenticeship or taking a year or two off from this career sprint suffer the most, and the final allocation of people to jobs is dismal (the fact that hundreds of thousands of Indians work at call centers is a symptom). The system fails by not providing such kinds of alternate opportunities at the scale that is necessary for a country so huge.
Finally, all middle income Indian parents will continue to pick some career in a STEM discipline for their kids very early on, preventing any investment of time in discovering their interests, keeping this carousel spinning.
What you're witnessing is the contradiction between real education (designed for learning) and credentialism. The truth is that the world is facing a massive crunch. Billions of people are struggling to get out of the circumstances they're trapped in. Getting a credential and getting a professional job is seen as one of the only paths out of the mire.
People who are desperate have no interest in free thinking. Their goal is to escape. That's it.
Ironically, I think it is seen as the only path, because it is marketed as such. Education is big business in India, and there is a banner advertising a trashy "college" on every corner. The quality is rarely great, yet the price is relatively steep. It just pushes people further into poverty, because the education fails to generate the opportunities it promises.
> there is a banner advertising a trashy "college" on every corner.
Right. In the computer field, for example, private "institutes" offering "post-graduate diplomas" are a dime a dozen, in every city, in the downtown as well as suburban areas. The standard signboards or ads for them show that they teach "C/C++, Java, .NET, web design, ASP.NET, Oracle, AutoCAD, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, ...". And it's mostly former "graduates" of the institutes that do the teaching, with no real life experience. As for the virtual version of these, I regularly get contacted by training companies (middlemen) for conducting courses for clients on Python, Linux or other skills I have. Many of them turn out to be shady in their practices and I have to fob them off.
Credentualisn hasn't gotten so bad that if I see a resume with certifications, I take that as a negative signal when I am interviewing candidates.
On the other hand, I've done a few certifications in my day but mostly to force myself To learn something. I usually leave the certifications off of my resume because of the stigma. I will talk about projects that I've done using the technologies.
I am curious what do you think about Coursera certificates. For example Coursera (Deep learning specialization)doesn't allow you to complete assignments and projects of the course without subscription. Also it just feels good to have a token of your weeks of effort.
Would you reject someone's resume if he showed this certification?
I didn't say I would reject their resume, I said it would be a slightly negative signal.
That being said, I just got my AWS Architect Associate certification this past weekend. The entire journey of me getting it, wasn't about the certification. I already had a job and probably by the time I am looking for a new one, I will have to renew it.
It forced me to learn about platform that I was just starting to build on and I was able to talk the talk - that's very important when you are an "architect" by name and/or responsibility.
In 2009, I did the same thing with respect to the MS architect cert - I took 6 tests got the certifications but by the time I was looking for a job, I had let them expire. I was transitioning from being a C/C++ bit twiddler to being an "enterprise developer". It forced me to learn about the technology.
In both cases, the certifications were about learning, not the certifications and in both cases, I was able to apply what I learned on the job. I put the projects on my resume - not the certs.
I would say the same thing about the Coursera certs. If they force you to learn and allow you to apply that knowledge to a real world project, preferable on the job but at least with a side project, it doesn't hurt.
It's a lot like when I was training to run a half marathon. It wasn't about the race, it was about the training. After I did them two weeks apart, I was never motivated to do that distance again.
I also broaden this to any place where metrics are involved. People optimize for the metrics instead of doing what the work is fundamentally supposed to be accomplishing. Else, you'll be left behind by the metrics chasers.
Reminds me of an anecdote Richard Feynman had in his book on the Brazilian education system [1]. Basically, the students could memorize crap from books but didn't really comprehend what they were learning, such that when Feynman would ask a question such as "if I hold a glass of water in front of this picture, what will it look like?" they couldn't answer. But if he asked "What is the refractive index of water?" they would answer instantly.
Yes... It's also worth being able to see this "other" in the mirror.
Chemistry education research describes US pre-college chemistry education content as "incoherent". A challenge when teaching high-school stoichiometry, is students not viewing atoms as real physical objects.
... I've had repeated conversations of the form "What do you think of this alternate way to teach X, which seems to yield a deeper understanding?" "Nifty! But... my students take the MCAS [high-stakes exam for medical school] soon, and all they need to know there is [rote-memorized superficiality]. Instruction time is short, and I'd be doing my students a disservice to spend time doing better."
... Plug-and-chug is a thing. Among teaching staff too. A widely-used text, repeated revised, for years had a problem 'apply the idea gas law to <conditions which would make it a solid> Argon'.
... Innumeracy is pervasive in society. There's more than a half century of journal letters from professors complaining that their physics/geology/other PhD candidates lack a quantitative feel for the field. http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/ started with one graduate student realizing their own lack, and trying to do something about it.
... A five-year old wishing to know what color finger paint to use for the Sun, had best not ask first-tier astronomy graduate students, who pervasively get this wrong. Of the few local outliers, as many learned it in a seminar on misconceptions in astronomy education, as in their "successful" astronomy education. Asking a follow-up question of "what color is sunlight?" often elicits as double take, as two rote-memorized inconsistent factoids collide, apparently for the first time.
You can do good astronomy research, without an informed five-year old's knowledge of Sun color. Years ago, a front-page NYTimes article went by, accurately reporting(!) a claim... that the Universe is green. Some folks working with spectra, had for outreach pushed them through some buggy open-source color code, and lacked the basic understanding to recognize the result as nonsense.
The then Brazilian education system was capable of training for rote regurgitation. But not for research. The US system is capable of training for research. But not for numerate multidisciplinary understanding. As is perhaps needed, for example, to create non-wretched science education content.
So as we look at the dysfunctional memorize-and-regurgitate of the Indian education system, it's worth remembering that we're facing similar challenges^W opportunities for transformational improvement.
This is an accurate observation on the IIT students. A student in an IIT is an demonstration for their will power to sacrifice their social life in their teens to know all the common problems(past years exam questions) by repeated practice. The one thing that makes harder to work with IIT students is they feel entitled forever and feels they belong to a higher caste. That is why its always best to form teams with only IIT graduates. Also another important thing to note is IIT as an under graduate is much tougher to get in to rather than as an IIT post graduate.
They seem efficient and ingenious. It's clear that they're optimizing for their incentives. They're incentivized to pass the test, so they come up with these brilliant schemes for cheating. I can't even get three friends to agree on a place to have lunch, how much organization, skill, and leadership does it take to cook up a class-wide cheating scheme? How valuable would that skill be in the workplace?
>What's funny, however, is that if you walk past an Indian shanty town, you will find examples of (often illegal) innovation at every corner, from stolen electricty to rigged water meters etc - usually concocted by people with little education. The innovative mindset exists in the heart of Indian society,
Yes, very true. Seen stuff like this myself. A couple of examples:
1. When living in Bhopal (city in central India) in teens, I used to frequent auto mechanic shops to get my bike or jeep fixed. Over many such visits over years, I was often amazed to see the way they innovated and managed with less resources, scrounged, adapted, etc., to get parts, to fix things, etc. I remember multiple cases where they were fixing a vehicle problem and needed a rod or wire or screw, and would just look around a bit, and almost inevitably would find some piece of metal nearby that fit the need, and make use of it, maybe with a bit of tweaking, such as filing, bending or hammering it. Of course, in a mechanic's shop you expect parts and scrap to be lying around, but still, it was uncanny. In North and Central India they use the word jugad a lot (some spell it jugaad, and it has a Wikipedia entry too, IIRC), for this ability or approach (not just related to mechanic's work but for anything in life), and that is what inspired me to name both my blogs "jugad", since the broad topic of both is software innovation. The older one, jugad's Journal, which was at jugad.livejournal.com, is not available now, after LiveJournal was acquired (except maybe via the internet Archive), but I've been blogging at the newer one, jugad2.blogspot.com, since 2008, except for some gaps.
2. In Pune, once, I was looking for C. K. Prahlad's book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid". [1] I first went into a well-known bookstore, Manny's, and asked the salesperson there for it. He had a lackadaisical manner and almost did not bother to reply, just mumbled something. maybe saying no.
Then I went out and just nearby, saw a bookstall on the footpath. I mentioned the book to the guy. Not only did he know the book title, he also knew the author's name, and mentioned a few other books by him. He then said he did not have the book right then, but could arrange to procure it in a few days. Sure enough, when I went back there a few days later, he had the book available, in the original, and I bought it. Very enterprising people, they often are, the roadside vendors and such, often more than more privileged people.
>and that is what inspired me to name both my blogs "jugad", since the broad topic of both is software innovation. The older one, jugad's Journal, which was at jugad.livejournal.com, is not available now, after LiveJournal was acquired
Interestingly, I checked again just now, and that older blog of mine, jugad's Journal, now seems to be accessible:
Anyone interested, feel free to check it out, there are some interesting (IMO) posts about software and startups there. I ran it from 2005 to 2008, so there are quite a few posts on it, just like on my later blog, jugad2.blogspot.com, which I've been running from 2008.
Italian here. In Naples we've been having those 'smart people who steal electricity and rig water meters' for a looooooooong time. You might want to find your exceptional talents here.
The pressure to succeed is immense everywhere, this is hardly a notable feature of Indian society. Others have mentioned this already on this thread but let me paraphrase, basically no one is satisfied with some objective notion of success (like a high standard of living), rather success means to do better than those around you. So if you have three cars parked in your garage in the USA and are living an impossibly comfortable life, materially, by all measures, it is nevertheless almost surely the case that you feel the "pressure to succeed".
Are you suggesting the pressure to succeed in the UK, where there exists a fairly comprehensive safety net in the form of welfare handouts, is the same as the pressure to succeed in India, where your government leaves you pretty much to fend for yourself? If that's what you're suggesting, I disagree.
Although I disagree as well (Indian youth has a much larger absolute, existential pressure to succeed than the UK youth has), however, mentally people tend to move to their frame of reference. People in most of the EU, if they fail in college they won’t die but many do feel immense and comparable pressure. You can tell them people in India are far worse off so count your blessings, like telling ‘Eat your sprouts, children in Africa are dying’, but that cannot really sway a young, stressed mindset. Anecdotal but a family member committed suicide because of this very pressure in an EU country with all the safety nets; he could not do as well as his friends in uni and the pressure got to him.
The answer is a bit nuanced and I am suggesting that it is the case, perhaps about the same instead of being exactly the same. You can argue that the apparent cost of not studying hard in is wildly different in these two countries (basic welfare support vs complete lack thereof). Yes, I agree that when you look at providing for basic material comforts in dire circumstances it obvious which country a person ought to choose, when presented with this hypothetical choice.
But that simply fails to capture the stresses of everyday life. The average person on welfare checks can hardly be assumed to happy and is probably facing intense, if subtle, negative societal feedback for the choices he is forced to make. Do you think this person is happy to eat at McDonalds and wear cheap clothes when everyone around him is upgrading their smartphones. That's why I say that providing for basic material comforts hardly does much to improve the mental well-being. The pressure to succeed is present everywhere, and failing to do so is stressful in all such circumstances, and I would imagine that it would be roughly the same.
Again this is an article on suicides and it is the most extreme form of pressure that anyone can face. The extent to which we can compare the stress on people that aren't doing well (by societal norms) is hard to pin down exactly, and I don't want to make any bold claims there that the stresses must be exactly the same. But I do see that there is a basic similarity here.
> Are you suggesting the pressure to succeed in the UK, where there exists a fairly comprehensive safety net in the form of welfare handouts, is the same as the pressure to succeed in India
I think pressure and poverty are not as highly coupled as you suggest.
Many of the students in this article who are committing suicide come from well off families.
On the other hand the majority of Indians are not facing such high levels of pressure despite facing far higher levels of poverty.
Yes. People aren’t motivated by economic statistics.
Everyone wants to do well relative to their peers. Talk to suburban high school seniors and they’ll rank themselves from the Ivy League to the people who settled for Duke, down to the future townies getting a job or girls who got knocked up.
From my observation, kids with certain strong cultural affiliations have the added pressure of family. It’s tough to be an American born Chinese kid whose extended family assumes you are a lazy loaf who has it easy — they are under intense pressure to succeed.
I'd argue that the US, especially in tech, doesn't suffer from "credentialism" like countries like India do. You can go and become an IT professional with zero qualifications and if you're good you can move up the ranks. In other systems you need to have x degree, x certification, or be part of x union, etc.
One of the US's biggest advantages is that low regulation environments help build a meritocracy of sorts as long as obvious corruption is curtailed.
Try being a French tech startup compared to the US and tell me how bad the US's credentialism, education, and regulatory processes are. I think we have it easy and a lot of our culture rewards and encourages 'free thinking' at least for now.
India's education system is based off of the old UK educational system, which involves heavy standardized testing to gain entry to university. This is not knew. My grandparents grew up in british India, and my parents were born at the very end of it. They all sat through exams, and results were published publicly. It's just the way it was and still is.
If anything, America has slowly drifted towards the old British model. India though is not copying anything.
>Sounds like they are copying the education system here in the USA.
>the USA.
>USA
Yes, of course. As always and forever. It is really all about the USA. And Americans. Please tell us more about where you live. As we all know, the USA is so much more interesting than the subject of the article. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the USA whatsoever. But that's boring. So, why don't you take the floor and tell us about what we're really all here to discuss. The USA.
The UK and Canada too based on my experience. In fact, I was like this up until just a few years ago in my life and have had to learn to unlearn things. May be the best schools do better but the ones I attended were about test taking. I would get good grades and then forget everything two weeks later. I also sought out well defined problem sets at work and the creativity only came out when I started working on my own projects.
This is a pretty inane article for placing too much emphasis on a stupid gimmick like anti-suicide ceiling fans, when the underlying issue is a serious mental health issue of extraordinarily stressed students.
I'm Indian and I remember the summer of my 12th grade exams back in 2007 just like yesterday because of some latent awareness that something very important is happening here. I sat in so many exams that summer. First was the CBSE boards aka AISSCE (which was the all-important failsafe), then AIEEE (for admission to the NITs), then BITSAT (for admission to BITS), and finally the IITJEE (for admission to the IITs). All these exams are fairly long, and you compete at the national level.
Already back then the competition was fierce with kids enrolling in tuition centers half a decade even before their first attempt at any of these exams (it was quite common for people to try a few times). I could write a very long essay about the depth of preparation that goes into attempting these exams. It is quite natural that the competitive pressures has worsened over the years with students attempting to out-prepare one another by even bigger margins.
In a country so huge, of course not all students attempt this route, but landing a seat in the small list of prestigious institutions is the only ticket to a good career in India for the most part. This is not unlike American students who take AP level courses, demonstrate exceptional talent in sports or music, or volunteer their time in different ways to stand out in the application process at one of the big name schools. So in that sense, this is describing a very relatable struggle among students across nations, though the means are substantially different.
the underlying issue is a serious mental health issue of extraordinarily stressed students
The underlying issue is that billions of people around the world are being squeezed through an ever shrinking funnel in a desperate attempt to escape poverty. The pressure continues to build, year over year. Looking at it as a "mental health" problem is only one less level removed from the source than looking at it as a "ceiling fan" problem.
The people referenced in the article, who attend several years specialized coaching preparing for these exams, paying large sums of money in the process, are hardly doing so in "a desperate attempt to escape poverty."
They are simply trying to prepare better than the competition.
Also you seem to get wrong some basic facts about how well the global economy is providing for and improving the state of people around the world. There are no billions that are attempting to escape poverty in the light of some shrinking funnel.
Yep. It matters less apparently if millions of people wander around feeling suicidal as long as they don't actually commit suicide. For what? So we can pick candidates for the professions more efficiently.
I did my grade 10 in 2009 and grade 12 in 2011, giving CBSE board exams as well. Holy hell, i remember those two years as pure torture. My day looked something like this,
Go to school at 6:30 ( didn't give much attention in classes), come home at 2:30, go to tuition from 4 to 9, come home, have dinner and then be forced to "study". Looking back, i still don't know how i survived that.
Contrast that to my undergrad in Canada where it was fun to study and do assignments.
- Ridiculously redundant number of tests : AIEEE, BITSAT, IITJEE, AIIMS MBBS, JIPMER MBBS, EAMCET/KCET/KEAM/TNEA (state level entrance tests in south india).
- Lack of common syllabus, common books : When every student's ultimate goal is to become a good engineer or a doctor , why so much disparity in the syllabus being taught in various high schools.
Hahaha, 2007 here too! I also felt really uneasy in December 2006 about where I was, so I wrote entrance examinations to a bunch of third rate colleges as well (VIT, Amrita, Manipal, etc)
> This is a pretty inane article for placing too much emphasis on a stupid gimmick like anti-suicide ceiling fans, when the underlying issue is a serious mental health issue of extraordinarily stressed students.
That's what happens when a nation of over a billion people has only a few hundred thousand spots on a top. It is insane competition. Wired is writing about it because this level of competition is absolutely foreign to the last few generations of westerners.
It is a norm for India, China or Russia. And these are the people who will be competing with us in 10-20 years.
India is seeing very rapid per capita GDP growth. So, while the number of top economic spots is limited the range of 'acceptable' is expanding fairly quickly.
However, exams like this are still stressful in Japan where high standards of living are far more accessible. Which suggests it's more about importance and being zero sum that's the core issue.
I am from Kota - the city mentioned in this article as the epicenter of this crisis. India's annual suicide rate is 10.5 per 100,000 people, while the suicide rate for the world as a whole is 11.6 per 100,000 [1]. Kota has seen an extremely large influx of young students over the last decade. Roughly 200,000 [2] students come to live in this city to study for college entrance exam. Now, while the high-pressure exams are a problem and there are a complex set of contributing factors that make the exams "high pressure" - social norms, lottery-ticket-out-of-middle-class-mindset, lack of other options, population, demographics (large number of young people) etc. - but the article is trying to make a link between the high pressure exam and suicides, that seems a bit problematic to me. This exam has existed for more than 50 years, and has always been very hard and high pressure.
This article states that "from the start of 2014 to November 2017, 45 Kota students committed suicide". Please make up your mind about the facts, but it seems like lazy journalism and a stretch to make the connection between the exam and suicides without accounting for deviations from per capita rates.
I am from Kota too and your argument is just nit-picking. Of course, when you're blaming high-pressure exams, you're also blaming every factor related to it. Your analysis of suicide rates fails to consider that these are very young students barely in the age group of 15-19 and the cause is singular (high-pressure parenting).
But suicide rate is just one symptom that this industry engenders. The immense pressure these kids are subject to is depressing as fuck. They (and their parents) all have been fed the dream that working 15 hours/day is a sure-shot way to make it in. And once you make in IIT, you don't have to fret about anything else.
Some kids have been working towards this dream, right from 6-7th grade. Yes! six years before they are to take the actual exam.
I was very lucky to escape this trap. I considered myself to be very dumb and knew that there's absolutely no chance I was going to make it.
Looking back, it just escapes me how so many people can come to believe that a single exam is going to narrate your whole fate in life.
> so what did you do instead? and can that be replicated by 100,000 other young people?
Theoretically, it can be replicated. The tools that I have used to learn everything are accessible to most of the people I have met. But, whatever may be the reasons, it just doesn't happen.
"Can be replicated as in "anyone can do it" or as in "everyone can do it"?
I love that the English language has two words ("anyone" and "everyone") that seem to be similar, but which in fact lead to vastly different scenarios.
Too many "solutions" people give for societal problems are of the "anyone" kind.
I am very curious what are these tools you talk about? I am often asked by students at my old high school about what they can do if they dont want to study for JEE and I havent really been able to come up with a satisfactory answer.
> that these are very young students barely in the age group of 15-19 and the cause is singular (high-pressure parenting)
I'm skeptical that an individual suicide is single-factor and deeply skeptical that a population-wide rate of this magnitude is driven by a single factor.
> India's annual suicide rate is 10.5 per 100,000 people, while the suicide rate for the world as a whole is 11.6 per 100,000
You need a little bit of caution here. It's very difficult to compare rates of death with other countries because there are different definitions for suicide, and different levels of recording and reporting.
In particular, there are problems in some areas of India of under recording deaths.
> In the last two decades, the suicide rate has increased from 7.9 to 10.3 per 100,000,8 with very high rates in some southern regions.9 In a study published in The Lancet in June 2012, the estimated number of suicides in India in 2010 was about 187,000.10 According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB); state of Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka have registered a consistently higher number of suicidal deaths during the last few years and together accounted for 56.2% of the total suicides reported in the country. Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state (16.5% share of the population) has reported a comparatively lower percentage of suicidal deaths, accounting for only 3.6% of the total suicides reported in this country, but this researcher feels that this is due to the underestimation of suicide cases in this area. There is a general agreement that previous statistics on the incidence of suicide in the Lucknow region were grossly inadequate and that their comparison based on the figures available is inaccurate and misleading. This causes the suicide problem to be underestimated and, thus, neglected by the government, although this problem seems to be universal. In addition, the features of deaths due to suicide are changing constantly, revealing complex social and cultural developments.11 Prichard and Amanullah (2007)12 suggested that, to avoid the under-reporting of suicides, both formal suicide verdicts and other violent deaths should be considered together because the other violent deaths may include hidden suicides.
India’s pop has been booming for more than 50 years, and we only got independence recently enough that institution building is measured in less than 100 years (to be fair many old colleges exist with older roots, but for the sake of comparison with the entire population, they are a drop in the bucket.)
Unfortunately time is not on our side, as it takes a long time to make institutions and good institutional habits.
To compound the problem- for most of 50 years there was huge bran drain. All those people who would become professors, or experts used their English advantage to move abroad and use their talents better.
Not to mention the years lost due to license raj.
I’d say things are slowly working out and improving. Whether it’s in time to help the demographics, I don’t know.
Sorry - beg to differ. 70 years is plenty of time to form good institutions.
Having lived in multiple countries, it is often clear to me that the reason for any country's woes almost always stems from their culture. Things may be different now, but historically Indian culture valued credentials and degrees a lot more than they did gaining knowledge. And many aspects of culture interfere with education. India is a country where relationships matter a lot more than, say, in the US. Part of that dynamic is the pressure to do favors for each other. This can be a huge problem when trying to objectively measure performance. I know a teacher in a 3rd world country who was given a hard time by society for not going easy on a student who happened to be a child of a relative. Stuff like that.
Culture is hard to change. Another example from another comment here: The fact that many students go to school, expect to learn little, and then spend hours with a tutor after school. I've spoken to parents from similar countries who:
1. Viewed the fact that their kids had tutors as a status symbol (clear barrier to change!)
2. Seriously could not comprehend the notion that teachers are supposed to teach well enough that going to a tutoring academy would not be required. I kid you not - quite a few refused to believe I was a top student and did not have a private tutor, and that my school had top teachers. For them, that's simply not how the world works.
With the right culture, you can build great institutions in a lot less than 70 years. But examples like the above are examples of a culture getting in the way of institution building, and you end up clashing with the culture at every step.
As I pointed out, most of India’s exemplary humans left.
The people who got the material, as opposed to just memorizing it, and could explain it in their native language - they’re not here.
While culturally there are issues, these are not responsible for the whole of the problem.
Also do note - Japan, China, and other nations also have this pattern for education.
At our population scale, the American system ceases to be useful since the classroom size is far too large. The problems am imdividual child has multiplied by the class of 40 students means that no teacher has the ability to customize fully.
I agree with your point that 70 years is plenty of time to form good institutions (e.g. China, South Korea etc.). But I disagree that culture is the culprit.
Firstly, Indian culture is incredibly diverse. If you live in Gujarat, you are respected a lot more for having your own business (whether its a Multi National Company or a corner shop) rather than an employee, even if you have a great job. If you live in Kerala, I imagine you are respected well if you go abroad and send remittances back. This is just a couple of difference on how different the cultures can be.
Credential ism is a very recent phenomena in Indian society, in place mostly because of the police-state like rule imposed on Indian society by the British. When all other methods of livelihood are elliminated (mostly, the textiles industry, but also local armaments and artists) and the only good jobs available are those in Government, of course the society will re-orient itself to satisfy those requirements.
There are many other, very good reasons for why Indian Institutions aren't as strong today as they should be. The Origin of Political Order is an excellent book if you're more interested in these things.
I agree Indian culture is very diverse - much more so than here in the US, for example. But let's look at some of the examples:
>If you live in Gujarat, you are respected a lot more for having your own business (whether its a Multi National Company or a corner shop) rather than an employee, even if you have a great job.
So most kids in Gujarat are not pressured to complete high school?
>If you live in Kerala, I imagine you are respected well if you go abroad and send remittances back.
To be honest, in my very limited experience, Indians living abroad are responsible for trying to improve quite a few institutions in India (in particular trying to build more educational/social institutions that benefit society in a way that existing ones fail). I honestly don't know if they are from Kerala though.
>Credential ism is a very recent phenomena in Indian society, in place mostly because of the police-state like rule imposed on Indian society by the British.
While I accept blame on the British, things that happened over 70 years ago is not "recent". The failure of not moving away from credentialism does not lie with the British.
>of course the society will re-orient itself to satisfy those requirements.
Incidentally, much of the credentialism existed in Britain as well in those years. Their implementing it in India was merely a way to mirror their own structures. However, the UK today is significantly less focused on these things, yet the sentiment is still strong in India. Yes, of course society re-orients itself to satisfy requirements, but the burden is on the society to re-orient itself once those requirements are no longer there.
BTW, my aim is not to minimize the impact of colonialism. I'm trying to point out that blaming colonialism will never be part of the solution to a country's woes.
Blaming doesn’t fix the problem, which we can agree on.
My point is that expectations of what can be achieved will have to be adjusted. India needs a huge investment of talent and money, and people would rather spend that talent and money to earn US$. The rational choice for individuals is clear.
On top of it class size, difficulty in testing at scale, job scarcity, language issues, discrimination, lack of teachers - make it an intractable problem.
> My point is that expectations of what can be achieved will have to be adjusted. India needs a huge investment of talent and money, and people would rather spend that talent and money to earn US$. The rational choice for individuals is clear.
Well, that depends on the individual. It may be a rational economic choice, but many of my friends do long for their home country and the social networks back there. Or just to not stand out from the general populace. So they will still go back.
Yes! Exponentially in last 10 years. When I took the exam a rank of 2.5 k was almost equal to not getting a rank. But now a rank of 10k has better opportunities!
Getting CS at Bombay, Kanpur, Delhi, Madras etc still requires a rank under 500 or so. Correct me if I am wrong but all the headline grabbing salaries are still restricted to these courses and institutes.
No way rank around 500 gives you CS in those colleges. Mine is 595 and did electrical engineering in Kharagpur. Electrical engineering is after CS and EC. Basically Your rank decides what institute and what branch you will be graduating in. Even though Kharagpur is on par with the institutes you mentioned, people don't prefer it as it's not in a metro City.
"Large group of young students in India, pursuing a future under impossible circumstances, collapsing under the immense pressure and leading some of them to commit suicide."
Well, that's terrible. Surely we should discuss why they even get to this point, and how this could be prevented?
"Most suicides happen by hanging from ceiling fans, so let's make anti-suicide ceiling fans."
While I agree that simply focusing on the method used is missing the bigger picture, it can have benefits. In England & Wales, changing domestic gas formulation dropped the overall suicide rate [1], so there is a precedent for positive effects from removing easy access. While this should certainly not be the only measure, it can be accomplished quite a bit more quickly and easily than changing both the university entrance process as well as the parenting culture. But I would consider it at-best to be a stopgap measure.
Obviously you need more than safer fans, but don't knock it. Reducing access to means and methods is the most important thing you can do for suicide prevention.
People talk about method substitution, but that doesn't always happen.
Yes, but sometimes it's best to take multiple simultaneous approaches when solving a problem, and sometimes the root of a problem is hard enough to solve that other approaches end up being more effective, at least in the short term. Means restriction is well-studied and does reduce suicide rates.
There was a point in my life where I chose to die, and the reason I'm alive right now is because I didn't have immediate access to lethal means. Every extra minute that it takes to figure out how to kill yourself is another minute of opportunity to change your mind, and that's what saved me. We absolutely should be focusing on mental health, but means restriction (particularly gun control in the US) is also an important thing for people to understand and consider.
Sure, work on that too. But the most effective measure so far for suicide prevention has been to reduce access to means and methods. This is replicated in many different areas across time.
There are various correlations which are very clear, like parents wealth. The question is whether these are ethical. If every school filters for such criterion, would students from poor or uneducated parents ever have a chance at social mobility? Do we want such a society?
In the US, the voting majority seems to want such a society, otherwise we wouldn't have so many politicians cutting education and other taxpayer funded support to families in need.
Yes, it’s ridiculous that kids can’t just be kids anymore, they already have to be a part of the hamster wheel by age 5-6. Knowing the alphabet at that age is far less important than gaining social skills by playing, and spending carefree time with other children.
It is expected for them to know the English alphabet. English is not the primary language spoken in most of India, so it is more difficult than it might seem.
Not sure if troll, but giving the benefit of the doubt...
You are clearly posting a comment comprised of letters of the alphabet. How would one do so without knowing the alphabet, assuming you typed it out rather than dictated it. And well, you also read the original reply. So are you having all that dictated for you? Or are you implying the reading/writing does not require knowing the alphabet (which is difficult to believe, but who knows)?
About the use of an alphabet, have you used a dictionary or any other system that is alphabetically ordered?
Apologise I didn't make it clear. What I mean is learning the order of the alphabet. I was taught read, write and type without ever being able to memorise the alphabet.
The last time I used a system that is alphabetically ordered was in a CD shop 10+ years ago. Im not being sarcastic but I use a dictionary regularly, I just search for word using Google.
By this, do you mean that you can't read? Or you can't remember the ordering of the letters? Or that you can recognize whole words but not as being made up of individual letters?
I am from India, and I have experienced the kind of pressure that this article is talking about. Personally, I feel that the root cause of this kind of pressure placed on teenagers is the abject fear of failure that is prevalent in India, especially in the middle class population. If one cannot crack these exams with flying colors, then society(most part of it at least) writes them off as losers who are doomed to a low paying job with no prospects of success in life, financial and personal.
A lot of people equate academic brilliance with intelligence and build up on that logic that it'll lead to financial prosperity, which in turn will lead to a good image in society and hence happiness. Don't have good marks, you are worthless. Never bother if you are a great athlete, singer, artist or any of the other vocations.
Even within academics, if you can't make it into one of the areas which pay a lot, like CS/EE/Medical science etc, then society views you with pity about your wasted talent. Doesn't matter how skilled of a Civil/Mechanical engineer or architect you are.
I feel lucky to have been exposed to the western system to get out of such a though process and hope that India can pick up some good things from the west in the field of education.
These things have always existed in India. Largely happens because most people come from a strata of society where failure is not an option. Should you fail, you go back to the same crappy conditions all life.
Having said that, Indians solicit social approval as a report card that evaluates their life. And due to this people face irrational pressures from total strangers who have no stake in their lives. I remember suicide cases were common even during lay offs.
Thank fully now the society is gradually gaining numbers in non-conformists. This is now considered cool. I remember as a teenager I was largely treated as a rebel outcast, if didn't care for social approval.
People need to understand they can do what they want, how they want, and on their terms. Social approval means nothing, especially if people granting the approval have no real stake in your life.
> Having said that, Indians solicit social approval as a report card that evaluates their life.
Ask any psychologist and they will confirm that 'soliciting social approval as a report card to evaluate their life' is basically a human condition affection close to 100% of the species.
The only thing 'Indian' about it is that maybe only Indians think that its an 'Indian' thing.
> The only thing 'Indian' about it is that maybe only Indians think that its an 'Indian' thing.
There are varying degrees of "social approval". Cultural anthropology studies envision societies to be broadly divided into shame vs guilt societies. In a guilt society, social control comes through via inculcation of guilt for undesirable behaviors. In a shame society, the primary means for social control is the inculcation of shame and fear of ostracism [0]. Generally, Eastern societies like India, China and Japan tend towards the shame society spectrum while Western societies like US tend towards the guilt society end.
[0] Wong, Y., & Tsai, J. (2007). Cultural models of shame and guilt. The self-conscious emotions: Theory and research, 209-223.
> The only thing 'Indian' about it is that maybe only Indians think that its an 'Indian' thing.
I am an Indian and I disagree with this. A large fraction (yes it is changing) of Indian society cares a lot about what relatives and neighbors would think about our lifestyle. There are so many taboos and restrictions inflicted upon family members simply because pressure from relatives and neighbors. My own family keeps quoting things like "what would relatives say" about my life choices. Now I live in a western society and I don't have to worry about it.
I am a first-generation American. Growing up, I thought my parents insistence on 'what would your relatives say' was an Indian thing. However, when i married my wife, I realized it's really not. My wife is Canadian / American, and her parents pull the same crap. When we were engaged, we decided to rent an apartment together. We weren't even going to live together, just getting our names on the lease so that when we married, we could live together.
My mother-in-law (who's not even religious, just really into appearance) threw a huge fit, and pulled the same sort of shame stunts that my parents do.
I don't think this is Indian at all, except Indians are more introspective about it.
Ok I am not claiming that Western society is free from such things but fraction of people who care about such things is much higher in India.
As per your American/Canadian in-laws I cant comment much on that as I never lived / be part of those societies. I am married to a German and met his extended family including grandparents (now in their 90s) uncles and aunts on several occasions. Never once anyone had any such discussions (I speak German). Including when we were living together before getting married. There are so many things which no one cares about them here but in India they still do!
No but Indian society carries this a little too far. Women in your neighborhood are always around to slander other women if they come to home late from work, or if they hang out with a male colleague.
Relatives are quick to tell you, some times even through sadistic remarks about things they don't like. You also seem to become an object of ridicule in case of failure.
Other irrational expectations include wedding expenditure, gifts and other show off stuff. Even clothes. You won't believe how many people seek social approval and standing from these things.
In case of exams and lay offs, the kind of discussion going on here. Many people play out the whole thing as some gory dead doomsday outcome, after which you would never be worthy of anything ever. Of course this doesn't do well for conformists, they just get anxious and end up taking these extreme decisions.
We are talking about way above what is considered "normal".
If something good happens, Indians know how to make the whole world know about it.
-> Extravagant weddings.
-> distributing sweets to the whole street when having a boy, when a student gets a good rank in exams.. etc.
>People need to understand they can do what they want, how they want, and on their terms
Not to be nit picker...but while encouraging to hear, that sentence seems a wee bit exaggerated. I think the main takeaway from your post--which I 100% agree with--is that social approval being the motivator in your life is a recipe for disappointment.
Extreme economic incentives perpetuate odd socio-economic behaviour. Look at the Japanese greying population renting everything from fake family to a complete fake wedding with the whole 9 yards[1](Yes Virginia there is a Netflix documentary on it as well[2]).
But enough about Japan. The dangers to India are very real.
- 1 million people entering the workforce every month due to demographics.
- 50% population engaged in agriculture providing 14% of the GDP.
- Difficult labor laws, swamped Judicial system makes for only technology intensive industries that employ fewer people.
It is a unique experiment in the history of Democracies where ~600 Million people need to be lifted out of poverty and into sustainable jobs. This has not been done before.
>To prepare, students from across India travel to the historic northern city of Kota, spending months or even years away from their family and home. Whether the children of manual labourers or business tycoons, all have traveled to Kota for one reason: academic glory
Highly misleading. Only a small percentage of people actually go to Kota for preparation, and the number of students in Kota coming from poorer sections of society is exetremely low. The coaching institutes are not cheap, sometimes costing almost as much as college tuition.
This paragraph paints it as some kind of pilgrimage that every student goes through.
An anecdote and a poll. I grew up in India in middle class family where education was considered important. A recurring nightmare (autual dream I see during sleep) I see even in my adulthood is about me about to take an exam and not being prepared for it. I do not see this nightmare often but I still remember it since the amount of panic I feel when I see it. I discussed with my wife and she also have these nightmare of similar nature. I wanted to check whether anyone out here see this and whether it is more prevalent in culture like Indian culture or is it a universal phenomenon?
American also born to an education-focused set of parents.
I've been out of school well over a decade and still have those nightmares. Usually correlates with work-stress for me now, but at least once or twice a year I wake up terrified out of a dream where I'm walking around my highschool (always highschool, never college, oddly, despite my college courses being MUCH harder; I think because the artificial stakes and utter lack of autonomy) trying to find the classroom for some test I didn't realize I had.
I had this same conversation with my wife recently as well. It still blows me away that I'm hard pressed to think of situations where I felt as stressed/panicked as I was in parts of highschool, and I've not shirked challenges by any means. I both respect and would not want to be a kid growing up nowadays.
I commented up in the thread too, but talking about it to my doctor helped me. I have a recurring dream of waking up two days before chemistry exam and not having prepared anything. I don't know why it's always chemistry, I'd pick another subject that I really struggled at like physics if there was a choice.
I can attest that, as an American, my parents (college educated) would always bring up that recurring nightmare whenever the topic of dreams came up. They casually noted that it happened frequently in their adult lives, and that it would inevitably happen to me once I graduated college. Notably they didn't see it as a negative, but a sign of a "conscientious personality."
Notice how large percentage of the article was about a stupid fan, whose main feature is falling off the ceiling, rather than about the actual topic you clicked on the article for.
I did a quick count: 6 paragraphs about 20 are directly devoted to his Smart Fan. 10 paragraphs out of 20 refer to ceiling fans. Also, an actual quote from the article:
"Engineer Sharad Ashani is fond of demoing his anti-suicide ceiling fan by attempting to hang himself on Indian TV."
You'd think/hope somebody making this kind of product would at least be aware of the Young Werther Effect.
The root problem is that there are too few institutes offering quality education, and given the limited seats, the competition is sky high. Without going to Kota, there is almost zero chance a student from a small town or village is going to make it to any of those institutions. The quality of education in a reputed City school and the best small town school is vastly different. I consider myself lucky that my district happened to have a good school, that students even from neighbouring districts attended (we are talking about travelling 30 kms to school). But not everyone has access to one and hence Kota is their only alternative.
The issue is that kids aren't taught to handle pressure, that is the main problem because parents pamper kids until they go to college!
as a child, you are not allowed to have your own decisions, like ever. You eat what your parents tell you to eat, you take admission to undergrad/postgrad about what your parents tell. You study hard as they told you, they even decide when and to whom you lose virginity! (arranged marriage)
No wonder if there is a little pressure then kids can't handle it. This is not a governmental issue, this is societal one. and the government can't do shit, pardon my language.
Now what will happen? The govt will panick and reduce the quality of exams, the exams which are already pathetic in quality, the proof for which can be found by counting the number of Indian instituties in top 100 in the world, ONE!!
I have studied in Indian and American universities. Many "top ranked" American universities have considerably milder requirements than what is required for passing IIT JEE.
Ranking is based on a number of factors like funding and number of foreign faculty and students. It has nothing to do with the toughness of the entrance exams.
In fact, if you rank institutes according to acceptance ratios, IITs will nearly be the top institutes in the world (the acceptance percentage, roughly 10000 among 1200000, or approx 0.8 percent), along with places like University of Tokyo. If you say restrict to the 5 old IITs, the acceptance ratio is around 0.4 percent. Acceptance ratios have been kept out from ranking parameters.
Sun Microsystems was started by an IIT grad (Vinod Khosla), and is responsible for the most popular software platform in the world. Without it, we wouldn't have a lot of the software we do today. I mean... I'm really not a fan of Java, but you'd be hard-pressed to deny its impact on computing.
Arguably, Sun Microsystems has had a much larger impact than facebook or google, which are mainly notable for their money making ability rather than their technical prowess. In comparison to Java, Google's attempt at programming languages (Go, for example) are exceptionally pathetic. Coming from someone who thinks Java is awfully engineered, that's really saying something.
I can give countless such examples about Harvard stanford. You can give me one and that too not a unicorn.
Can't you see my point? Sun was bought by Oracle because of Java, so Khosla basically developed a language which Oracle bought.
I am not belittling the achivements of Khosla, but other institutes outside India have achieved far greater than what Indian institutes can hope to attain
you can't compare Go and Java. Both languages have widely different. Java was meant to writing softwares for systems like fridges Go was meant to write softwares by a large team and exploit parallel processing architecture of modern CPUSs
And trust me, Go is much better when it comes to writing backends and web services
Actually, the list is quite extensive. I called out Sun mainly because it is a class above Google and Facebook. Also, Sun contributed significantly more than just Java: Solaris (one of the first widely used kernels that had containers), SPARC, VirtualBox, OpenOffice, ZFS. I think it's really sad that people have forgotten the contributions of the first-generation of large computer companies. I rank Sun Microsystems with the likes of Microsoft and Apple.
Also, other than Google or Facebook, I can't mention any company of that size founded by Harvard or Stanford Alums (in the computation industry at least). Can you?
Other examples BTW are Cirrus Logic, Zoho, Infosys, etc.
The top school on the list, Stanford University, claims 51 unicorn founders as alumni while runner-up Harvard University has 37. Rounding out the top three is the University of California with 18.
This is the truth but I can just tel you the truth, I can't make you believe it.
I'm not sure what there is to believe. Obviously, Stanford and Harvard are at the top of the list when it comes to founders. However, you claimed that IIT has never produced a company the likes of Facebook or Google. I pointed out a few companies that are in the same league. Moreover, the source you linked to points out that IIT is the fourth highest unicorn founder producer. This is quite notable, given that it's an institute in a relatively poor country. It's more notable given that Indian graduates are at a disadvantage when competing in the united states as well, due to extra regulation on foreign companies or the overhead of immigration.
I'm not sure what point you were trying to prove with your graph. I never claimed that IIT produced more superstars than Harvard or Stanford, only that it does produce some.
You said:
> Tell me how many googles, facebooks have been started by IIT grads.
The number is 18, according to your data, which makes it #4 in the world, which is a very respectable position.
I agree with you on most things but not the last part. Have you even seen Indian Engineering/Medical entrance exam questions? North American high school exams are a joke compared to Indian Engineering Entrance tests. And IITs are good schools. They aren't ranked as high because they don't fulfil the breadth requirements for those ranking studies. They are purely engineering schools.
And yet there hasn't been one unicorn out of any IITs. All IITians or most of them go out of India. What di I do of the tough entrace exams? What is the use if IITs?
I appreciate this for the article points out an alarming issue.
But there has been slight mis-representation. It slightly portrays that Indian engineering education landscape starts and ends in IITs only.
No, there are the NITs, BITSes, IIITs, IISc and others which have equal facilities as IITs and are even doing better than some IITs.
>>It slightly portrays that Indian engineering education landscape starts and ends in IITs only.
Well, the problem is people treat degrees from these institutions as lifelong aristocratic privilege. Once you start going in that direction, its now in your interest to keep the myths alive about your alma mater.
How else are you going to earn higher than everybody else? You have to convince the society nobody can ever be good as you, by very social design, and you have to keep things that way.
Can you point to any job description that says so? I have never seen any job description that mentions only IIT students can apply for the job. I have seen some mediocre companies mentioning open to only IITs, NITs, and IIITs though.
Almost all jobs of good software engineering companies these days have a top college degree as a requirement in their job ads. If you have been in the job market you would know the fact that it's the degree that matters most. Companies prefer to even give an interview only if you have a degree from top-tier college. Whether we like it or not it's the fact that here we need a degree from top college to get good opportunities and job.
I have no idea what top-tier company are you talking about. Google, for example, doesn't care about from which college you graduated and hire through APAC test. If you are good enough to be in the top n percentile you would be called for an interview in Google. Take a look at https://www.hackerrank.com/jobs/search. No companies give a shit about which college you are from as long as you pass the coding test.
https://www.hackerrank.com/jobs/search?location=bangalore_ar... - there is not even single job in bangalore area listed there. First of all, if you don't have a degree from good college it's very difficult to even get an initial round interview. My point is you won't even get an interview call unless you are from top college. It's the ground reality. I am speaking from experience of seeing many with tier 1 degree getting interviews while people from bad colleges having hard time even getting an interview despite having better github and projects to showcase. In reality getting a tier 1 college degree matters most than anything else no matter how much you argue. It has got to do with the quality of engineering education in low tier colleges and so being from a low tier college is a label of being incompetent. Tier 1 college graduates on the other hand get better opportunities, have more alumni connections working in top companies, are already certified to be smart and hence get opportunities.
and I don't want to pick ads but since you are not speaking the truth about the ground reality I would like you to check: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/613566647/. It clearly mentions "B Tech in Computer Science or equivalent from a reputed college" as the qualification required. I don't understand why it's so difficult to open eyes and see the reality, a good college degree has a lot of value in India.
And the constant taunting they get when they are not able to get 'expected' package .
'Oh you are from IIT why working in this startup at such low package.
My friend from XYZ college is working for much better company/salary than you.'
Interests, skills, background, ambitions and the human behind the degree all goes to hell.
The ridiculous thing is that exams are irrational: they don't measure knowledge and ability, i.e. they don't measure what they purport to measure. It makes the societal scale suffering and death all the more meaningless and disturbing.
Why do you think they don't measure knowledge and ability? They're not perfect of course, but I mean asking you to demonstrate your competence in a series of problems is going to give at least a reasonable ballpark of somebody's competence.
Yeah, things like preparation classes can kind of turn it all into gaming the system, but on the other hand I'm quite curious what percent of people that scored e.g. perfectly on the math on the SAT actually took these classes. I did, and I never did any preparation - but I've always enjoyed and done well at math, and I think my performance was reflected in this. And I don't think somebody who had no ability or enjoyment of math is suddenly going to start scoring very well just because of some prep classes.
The way I see it. Exams can check recall of facts, names, definitions. Also skill at identifying narrow classes of problems (which resemble facts) and extracting them from unrealistic settings. e.g. 'There are 49 dogs signed up to compete in the dog show. There are 36 more small dogs than large dogs signed up to compete. How many small dogs are signed up to compete?' and other such trick questions.
The former can be crammed and quickly forgotten. Not knowledge. The latter skill isn't knowledge of the relevant field.
In the less rigorous, more arty fields (shall we say) the trick is usually to flatter the examiners by firing their own opinions back at them in original ways. This can be highly skillful and requires awareness of the academic milieu. But not knowledge of the relevant field.
What counts is depth, and depth depends on semantic connections, including connections to other fields. These are all differentiated and can't be meaningfully added to yield a number, as if we were counting eggs or measuring a distance.
I took a look at chemistry, english, and CS. I noticed that there were relatively few multiple choice questions compared to American exams. All exams had a written component, and the questions seem thought out. The english test in particular seemed to actually focus on real-life use cases for language (speech writing, ad drafting, and mannerisms), which is arguably more important than what American schools typically spend all their time on (the literary essay or persuasive essay).
Just wondering how this might be tied to the statistic[1] which ranks top countries (hours/week) where parents help their kids with their homework. India ranks as the top country. This might set bad habits to the students with learning, as they come more dependant to get help from their parents (and other peers) and it might also hamper their problem solving skills.
And not too far from parental "assistance: is the question of cheating, which is reportedly widespread. Is it the pressure of the exams alone, or anger about the cheating-prevention measures?
Somewhat related, I recall stories of riots in China due to anti-cheating measures -- teachers and proctors were dragged into the streets and beaten, and one parent indignantly proclaimed "It's not fair! If they cannot cheat, how will they succeed?"
One thing for Westerners to be aware of: In India, your exam scores (SAT-type thingys) are public, very public. They are usually published in a special edition of the local newspaper, in descending order. Meaning that the best kid comes first in a very public way. Couple this with the familial honor system/arranged marriages and I think you'll understand why pressure can be so intense. Even your love-life can be radically changed by these tests.
Yup.. My parents and aunts and uncles all tell us how great we have it. Their results were all published publicly. Interesting to know it still happens.
The exploding population of India has put a huge pressure on the public infrastructure. Any credible university/college (because of numerous swindling orgs) which usually means govt. run has a flood of candidates, the IITs being the archetypal example. Add this to the social pressure put by the definition of success according to the culture and you've got yourself in an Indian pressure cooker[1] which shapes you to perfectly fit the mold of the educational system- effectively quenching creativity.
I wouldn't generalize though. The smart still are able to wiggle through and come out the other end without selling their soul. But the opportunity cost for the others who would have excelled given better instruction and infrastructure is unfathomable.
> From the start of 2014 to November 2017, 45 Kota students committed suicide.
Every suicide is a tragedy, but what's the base rate? I have no idea if 45 is a lot or a little without knowing how many people were Kota students during this timeframe and what the overall youth suicide rate in India is. For all the reader knows, the suicide rate is lower in this population. Why doesn't the media report the basic information that would make their case? It's bad, innumerate reporting.
I bring this up because the way this is reported is similar to the Foxconn suicide "scandal" where it turned out the suicide rate among Foxconn employees was lower than the national average. (https://www.zdnet.com/article/media-gets-its-facts-wrong-wor...)
The problem is not with the exams. When millions try to get past the bottleneck with width of 10K, the competition will obviously be intense. And a developing country like India cannot afford more institutes like IITs, even those that currently exist(the newer ones) need a lot of improvement, especially funding for research.
IMHO, the problem lies with the parents who push/force their children into a race that they don't want to be a part of. Then it doesn't matter if they excel or not, they feel lost and hopeless. The number of classmates I had during engg who had no interest in engg/CS was huge.
Solving this problem would solve a lot of issues. It's getting solved as people are getting disillusioned from Engg == Money. The number of students applying to engg is gradually decreasing every year (80K less this year).
Surprised Korea wasnt mentioned, I believe they have the highest suical rates if Im not mistaken. The kids starting from elementary start school at 7am and comes back home around midnight. Which is really gross and atrocious to hear, almost as bad as labor camps if you ask me.
My parents died when I was 7. I starved for food when I was a kid. My elder siblings sacrificed everything to buy me books. I wore tattered clothes all my childhood. Today, at age 38, I'm worth many millions of dollars and living in Silicon Valley. Why? For three years, between ages 15-18, I worked my arse off, studying under candle lights and streetlights (no electricity at home) and got into IIT.
I agree that something needs to be done.
A few of my relatives went into depression and have serious mental health issues due to the stress of preparing for IIT JEE. Having seen both sides of the story, I don't have a solution.
A good job can be life changing, while the human toll it takes along the way cannot justify the means...
India is a country with a huge split. There is a lot of rich people and and a lot of poor people. This is the only chance a lot of these kids have to get out of their situation. We complain about america's social safety net well India's is a lot worse. It doesn't really even exist. If some of these kids can't get out they lose hope. I think the dream is get into IIT, get into MNC or US college and get out.
Yeah it puts a huge amount of pressure on kids because it might not be just them, but their families too. They are making huge sacrifices too for their kid to succeed.
As an Indian who's been through this (and luckily got out) - for every one person who rebels, you'll have nine others who'll be lining up to take that person's place.
Smash the institutions providing a way to raise themselves up, and then...?
I assume you'd want them to build up new ones, to which I'd ask, out of what, exactly? And when they build up new ones, how will these new ones avoid having the problem that they must inevitably pass through a period where the number of people who want to use them will grossly exceed the available capacity of the system?
Rebelling against the school system is inverse tragedy of the commons - large individual loss and small societal gain. There is no real incentive to do that.
The situation is nothing new. I am from Bangalore and often hear a well known anecdote about Mysore, a large historically rich city about 100 km from Bangalore. I hear it from people of my parents' generation, so it must be the 60s. Its invariably said in a humorous tone.
The 10th year of school is a very important stage, transitioning to university, and the exam has always been stress inducing. On the day of the result, there were policemen guarding a lake called kukkarahalli kere in order to stop students who failed from committing suicide.
The important thing what people miss outside india is that india forces people to marry by 28 or so. This mean the thought responsibiliy is so huge. This is not the case in western society. It is much more evolved. An individual has a free choice to choose work less and enjoy and not have a family. This is sadly not the case in india.
When more than 50% of seats are reserved under quotas, what is there left to compete, unless you are the brightest of the bright. It is irrational to put efforts to study for exams for both open category candidates and those under reservation categories.
Have you ever been in a situation where all you want is for it to be no more? I have, and while I haven't actually considered suicide, few thoughts have definitely ran through my mind wondering "what if I just didn't exist anymore so that I wouldn't be in this miserable situation" before quickly snapping out of it. Some people don't snap out of it and latch onto it while it slowly festers, and then ultimately it just happens on a particularly low day.
It could be possible that students in a high-stress, highly-competitive, financially-addled situation are unable to see the cold logic you've presented.
if you are dead, you don't have to deal with failure. For young kids who are easily impressionable - failure not being an option is forced into kids since kindergarten.
This happens in the USA too, except at college level. A nearby shooting range has had a few suicides by Asian students at the end of the spring semester.
When I learned that the military suicide rate is no higher than the suicide rate in the civilian world, my criteria for believing that any one thing is so deleterious to mental health that it actually drives people to suicide went up tremendously.
Our minds are remarkably robust and most will handle immense pressure. Some minds just aren't. Sure, they'll crack under pressure. But that pressure can come from literally anywhere, including existential angst that comes from nowhere but the person's own mind.
Hence why suicide rates tend to remain constant no matter the situation.
I wouldn’t expect the military suicide rate to be higher than the civilian one. Yes, the military does involve stresses, but there is also some sense of camaraderie and common cause. I’d expect more suicide in places where people don’t get those kinds of social bonds.
from what i read and what i saw in test cheating,is it common in india culture? our local high school is investigating test cheating,turns out all of them(12) are from indian,which puzzled me, other culture treats test cheating something extremely bad,but the india students probably think it is not a big deal?
Indian here, unfortunately cheating/not following rules is part of our culture. Most of the times you dont get caught, if you do get caught then you just have to pay a small bribe and you are free.
So if you dont cheat you will fall behind everbody else is doing it so you do it as well
> I WONDER IF we have ever asked ourselves what education means. Why do we go to school, why do we learn various subjects, why do we pass examinations and compete with each other for better grades? What does this so-called education mean, and what is it all about? This is really a very important question, not only for the students, but also for the parents, for the teachers, and for everyone who loves this earth. Why do we go through the struggle to be educated? Is it merely in order to pass some examinations and get a job? Or is it the function of education to prepare us while we are young to understand the whole process of life? Having a job and earning one's livelihood is necessary - but is that all? Are we being educated only for that? Surely, life is not merely a job, an occupation; life is something extraordinarily wide and profound, it is a great mystery, a vast realm in which we function as human beings. If we merely prepare ourselves to earn a livelihood, we shall miss the whole point of life; and to understand life is much more important than merely to prepare for examinations and become very proficient in mathematics, physics, or what you will.
> So, whether we are teachers or students, is it not important to ask ourselves why we are educating or being educated? And what does life mean? Is not life an extraordinary thing? The birds, the flowers, the flourishing trees, the heavens, the stars, the rivers and the fish therein - all this is life. Life is the poor and the rich; life is the constant battle between groups, races and nations; life is meditation; life is what we call religion, and it is also the subtle, hidden things of the mind - the envies, the ambitions, the passions, the fears, fulfilments and anxieties. All this and much more is life. But we generally prepare ourselves to understand only one small corner of it. We pass certain examinations, find a job, get married, have children, and then become more and more like machines. We remain fearful, anxious, frightened of life. So, is it the function of education to help us understand the whole process of life, or is it merely to prepare us for a vocation, for the best job we can get?
> What is going to happen to all of us when we grow to be men and women? Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be? Have you ever asked yourselves this question? Should you not ask it? If your family is wealthy you may have a fairly good position already assured, your father may give you a comfortable job, or you may get richly married; but there also you will decay, deteriorate. Do you see?
> Surely, education has no meaning unless it helps you to understand the vast expanse of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a very good job; but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid? So, while you are young, must you not seek to find out what life is all about? And is it not the true function of education to cultivate in you the intelligence which will try to find the answer to all these problems? Do you know what intelligence is? It is the capacity, surely, to think freely without fear, without a formula, so that you begin to discover for yourself what is real, what is true; but if you are frightened you will never be intelligent. Any form of ambition, spiritual or mundane, breeds anxiety, fear; therefore ambition does not help to bring about a mind that is clear, simple, direct, and hence intelligent.
> You know, it is really very important while you are young to live in an environment in which there is no fear. Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living, afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or husband would say, afraid of death. Most of us have fear in one form or another; and where there is fear there is no intelligence. And is it not possible for all of us, while we are young, to be in an environment where there is no fear but rather an atmosphere of freedom - freedom, not just to do what we like, but to understand the whole process of living? Life is really very beautiful, it is not this ugly thing that we have made of it; and you can appreciate its richness, its depth, its extraordinary loveliness only when you revolt against everything - against organized religion, against tradition, against the present rotten society - so that you as a human being find out for yourself what is true. Not to imitate but to discover - that is education, is it not? It is very easy to conform to what your society or your parents and teachers tell you. That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living, because in it there is fear, decay, death. To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself.
> But you are not encouraged to do this; no one tells you to question, to find out for yourself what God is, because if you were to rebel you would become a danger to all that is false. Your parents and society want you to live safely, and you also want to live safely. Living safely generally means living in imitation and therefore in fear. Surely, the function of education is to help each one of us to live freely and without fear, is it not? And to create an atmosphere in which there is no fear requires a great deal of thinking on your part as well as on the part of the teacher, the educator.
> Do you know what this means - what an extraordinary thing it would be to create an atmosphere in which there is no fear? And we must create it, because we see that the world is caught up in endless wars; it is guided by politicians who are always seeking power; it is a world of lawyers, policemen and soldiers, of ambitious men and women all wanting position and all fighting each other to get it. Then there are the so-called saints, the religious gurus with their followers; they also want power, position, here or in the next life. It is a mad world, completely confused, in which the communist is fighting the capitalist, the socialist is resisting both, and everybody is against somebody, struggling to arrive at a safe place, a position of power or comfort. The world is torn by conflicting beliefs, by caste and class distinctions, by separative nationalities, by every form of stupidity and cruelty - and this is the world you are being educated to fit into. You are encouraged to fit into the framework of this disastrous society; your parents want you to do that, and you also want to fit in.
> Now, is it the function of education merely to help you to conform to the pattern of this rotten social order, or is it to give you freedom - complete freedom to grow and create a different society, a new world? We want to have this freedom, not in the future, but now, otherwise we may all be destroyed. We must create immediately an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt; because it is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing, constantly learning, that you find truth, God, or love; and you cannot inquire, observe, learn, you cannot be deeply aware, if you are afraid. So the function of education, surely, is to eradicate, inwardly as well as outwardly, this fear that destroys human thought, human relationship and love.
From Think On These Things (or This Matter of Culture), Chapter 1, The Function of Education
> Questioner: If all individuals were in revolt, don't you think there would be chaos in the world?
> Krishnamurti: Listen to the question first, because it is very important to understand the question and not just wait for an answer. The question is: if all individuals were in revolt, would not the world be in chaos? But is the present society in such perfect order that chaos would result if everyone revolted against it? Is there not chaos now? is everything beautiful, uncorrupted? Is everyone living happily, fully, richly? Is man not against man? Is there not ambition, ruthless competition? So the world is already in chaos, that is the first thing to realize. Don't take it for granted that this is an orderly society; don't mesmerize yourself with words. Whether here in Europe, in America or Russia, the world is in a process of decay. If you see the decay, you have a challenge: you are challenged to find a way of solving this urgent problem. And how you respond to the challenge is important, is it not? If you respond as a Hindu or a Buddhist, a Christian or a communist, then your response is very limited - which is no response at all. You can respond fully, adequately only if there is no fear in you, only if you don't think as a Hindu, a communist or a capitalist, but as a total human being who is trying to solve this problem; and you cannot solve it unless you yourself are in revolt against the whole thing, against the ambitious acquisitiveness on which society is based. When you yourself are not ambitious, not acquisitive, not clinging to your own security - only then can you respond to the challenge and create a new world.
> Questioner: To revolt, to learn, to love - are these three separate processes, or are they simultaneous?
> Krishnamurti: Of course they are not three separate processes; it is a unitary process. You see, it is very important to find out what the question means. This question is based on theory, not on experience; it is merely verbal, intellectual, therefore it has no validity. A man who is fearless, who is really in revolt, struggling to find out what it means to learn, to love - such a man does not ask if it is one process or three. We are so clever with words, and we think that by offering explanations we have solved the problem.
> Do you know what it means to learn? When you are really learning you are learning throughout your life and there is no one special teacher to learn from. Then everything teaches you - a dead leaf, a bird in flight, a smell, a tear, the rich and the poor, those who are crying, the smile of a woman, the haughtiness of a man. You learn from everything, therefore there is no guide, no philosopher, no guru. Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.
> Questioner: It is true that society is based on acquisitiveness and ambition; but if we had no ambition would we not decay?
> Krishnamurti: This is really a very important question, and it needs great attention.
> Do you know what attention is? Let us find out. In a class room, when you stare out of the window or pull somebody's hair, the teacher tells you to pay attention. Which means what? That you are not interested in what you are studying and so the teacher compels you to pay attention - which is not attention at all. Attention comes when you are deeply interested in something, for then you love to find out all about it; then your whole mind, your whole being is there. Similarly, the moment you see that this question - if we had no ambition, would we not decay? - is really very important, you are interested and want to find out the truth of the matter.
> Now, is not the ambitious man destroying himself? That is the first thing to find out, not to ask whether ambition is right or wrong. Look around you, observe all the people who are ambitious. What happens when you are ambitious? You are thinking about yourself, are you not? You are cruel, you push other people aside because you are trying to fulfil your ambition, trying to become a big man, thereby creating in society the conflict between those who are succeeding and those who are falling behind. There is a constant battle between you and the others who are also after what you want; and is this conflict productive of creative living? Do you understand, or is this too difficult?
> Are you ambitious when you love to do something for its own sake? When you are doing something with your whole being, not because you want to get somewhere, or have more profit, or greater results, but simply because you love to do it - in that there is no ambition, is there? In that there is no competition; you are not struggling with anyone for first place. And should not education help you to find out what you really love to do so that from the beginning to the end of your life you are working at something which you feel is worth while and which for you has deep significance? Otherwise, for the rest of your days, you will be miserable. Not knowing what you really want to do, your mind falls into a routine in which there is only boredom, decay and death. That is why it is very important to find out while you are young what it is you really love to do; and this is the only way to create a new society.
> Questioner: In India, as in most other countries, education is being controlled by the government. Under such circumstances is it possible to carry out an experiment of the kind you describe?
> Krishnamurti: If there were no government help, would it be possible for a school of this kind to survive? That is what this gentleman is asking. He sees everything throughout the world becoming more and more controlled by governments, by politicians, by people in authority who want to shape our minds and hearts, who want us to think in a certain way. Whether in Russia or in any other country, the tendency is towards government control of education; and this gentleman asks whether it is possible for a school of the kind I am talking about to come into being without government aid.
> Now, what do you say? You know, if you think something is important, really worth while, you give your heart to it irrespective of governments and the edicts of society - and then it will succeed. But most of us do not give our hearts to anything, and that is why we put this sort of question. If you and I feel vitally that a new world can be brought into being, when each one of us is in complete revolt inwardly, psychologically, spiritually - then we shall give our hearts, our minds, our bodies towards creating a school where there is no such thing as fear with all its implications.
> Sir, anything truly revolutionary is created by a few who see what is true and are willing to live according to that truth; but to discover what is true demands freedom from tradition, which means freedom from all fears.
Wow, this sounds so much like China. In college I had a professor who obsessed over a conundrum: India, the world's largest democracy, is also its poorest. Why? He believed it was due to caste, religion, and education. I wonder if India is continually looking east and trying to duplicate some of the Chinese rise to power.
I've personally hired a number of people in my Delhi office from the local IIT, and these are a few things I've noticed amongst new grads: parrot fashion learning is rife across the board. Despite being smart, they often struggle to think on their feet. It's as if they want a fully defined a problem domain, AND want to solve problems only within that defined domain, much like an exam! Anything outside of their comfort zone is met with a rather damp response equating to "we haven't covered that in class yet". In business (and even development), that attitude is not a good one to have.
What's funny, however, is that if you walk past an Indian shanty town, you will find examples of (often illegal) innovation at every corner, from stolen electricty to rigged water meters etc - usually concocted by people with little education. The innovative mindset exists in the heart of Indian society, but the education system somehow seems to restrict it by making people believe that the path to success is narrow and the same for everyone. Hence the competition.
I feel the education system needs to encourage free thinking more than rote learning. I believe it would allow students to enjoy their subjects, rather than just looking at them as a stepping stone to success. Perhaps if students approached their studies with a sense of wonder and excitement, rather than competetive aggression, their mental state would be significantly better during their years of education.