The vicious cycle of poor quality, high cost education and how it deprives our country of enterprise

In many ways, I am a cliché. I am an engineer and an MBA (General Category, if you must know), and I then entered the corporate sector to draw a salary that helps pays bills. I studied very little and somehow managed to crack two entrance exams. In many ways, I was a misfit – I was the exception that managed to make it precisely because I hated rote-learning, precisely because I hid novels in my Resnick Haladay or my FIITJEE DPPs. Precisely because I “wasted time” in debate and quiz club in school, when I could have been mugging up Chemistry.

I have worked for almost a decade in the corporate sector and let me tell you that despite being from among the best B-Schools and among the best Engineering Colleges, not one subject (OK, maybe just the one) prepared me for corporate life. Sample this – I came across this problem when my daughter was scribbling on one of my old FIITJEE copies.

Problem 1 - Hunter and Monkey. A monkey hangs from a branch at a height h above the ground. A hunter stands on the ground at a distance R from the tree, and is pointing his gun at the monkey at an angle (theta) to the horizontal, as shown in figure (1):

If the monkey jumps down from the tree at the same time as the hunter fires the bullet, what should be the value of theta, to hit the monkey?

In some way while I was doing these kind of problems at FIITJEE, I always thought my future career would involve monkeys and hunters, or mechanical contraptions mimicking the monkey and the hunter. For me, in 11th standard, the breaking point was fluid dynamics and organic chemistry. Both stumped me completely – but being the perfectionist that I was then as I am now, I continued to go at them never really understanding either, until the syllabus had moved so far ahead that I had to give up.

I decided to focus on NCERT and board exams early in 12th, giving up on IIT. IIT anyway meant nothing but a high paying job to me, and I figured I could eventually put my mind to anything and eventually make money doing it. Sadly, fates conspired for me to clear DCE’s entrance exam (DCE had a separate entrance exam then) and I ended up becoming an engineer.

However, once I entered engineering college, I realized how advantaged I was precisely because I had not given up my life to focus on IIT. (Some of my batchmates will disagree but) I had a rounded personality, I had leadership traits, and most importantly, I had developed a joy for reading that made me both read and comprehend English at almost lightning speed. When I (inevitably) began preparing for CAT, I realized how far ahead I was, needing almost no preparation for English Reading Comprehension, but quite a lot for DI (I hated DI with a vengeance).

MBA entrance exams like CAT were far easier than engineering entrance for me, and I ended up in FMS. It was then that I ended up meeting a hundred odd people like me – talented misfits, great at one or many things, super smart and fun to work and learn with. The one class we had in FMS which still helps me was IT or Computer skills, in which the Professor taught us Excel and Word tricks that put most of us ahead of the field when we joined the corporate world.

It was when I started working that I realized how useless my entire education had been. Yes, education had given me a scientific temper which helped me understand medium to difficult statistics (needed in most of my roles so far), and it had given me Microsoft skills, but beyond that it was my love of reading, my public speaking experience and my (decidedly moderate) curiosity developed by quizzing that helped me. Work was about communication – both written and oral, influencing people without authority or with authority, nurturing people and getting things done. My formal education did zilch to prepare me for any of these. It was quizzing and non-fiction that gave me a love of learning and not the monkey/ hunter/ parabola, or the formula of some ether molecule in organic chemistry. It was my debating experience that gave me a fearlessness of speaking in public (and speaking my mind!). And it was the novels that I hid in my course books that gave me a command over the English language (and the annoying habit of needing to write books and articles like this, you might say).

Our education system is broken and there are now startups who will charge parents thousands or lakhs of rupees to help get their children ahead in this broken system. But none of these startups teach vital life skills. Our schools and colleges also make essential life skills optional, so that only the few like me who have an interest or were nudged into some of these hobbies by their parents, manage to gain vital life skills. They condition us to not dream but mug up, to filter out the wrong options from four multiple choice questions – not teaching us one bit about how life and work are all about people and managing or influencing them. And thus, they condition us to follow the trodden path – mug up, get into a decent college, do a post-grad and sit for placements. 

Not that I would have been an entrepreneur, but clearly the minority of India born multinational organizations and their lack of scale is a symptom of our education system which dis-incentivizes risk taking and teaches only about exam management. Yes, our poor labor law, land law and tax law system is to blame, but then isn’t the education system to blame for that as well? The average bureaucrat or politician who is a product of the same education system, cannot even comprehend the scale of a US tech behemoth (think Netflix, Google), and thus cannot think big, cannot dream.

It would be awesome if people put life skills ahead of marks for their children, and celebrated accumulating them. All my education got me (for the most part) was a foot in the door, but the right system would help our children create doors of their own, wherever they want.

And not waste their growing years solving problems about monkeys, hunters, bullets and pulleys. Or worrying about where to put the covalent bond in an ether molecule.