EDUCATION
Modi’s gargantuan plans lack skilled workers
The education-system must be privatized entirely
Prime-Minister Modi aims to turn India into a chip-manufacturing-hub in hopes to bring business into the nation and compete with China. This represents another gargantuan plan by a visionary leader, that generated some excitement. However, before one pops the Champaign bottles, one should understand the rules of economic behavior.
- Government programs rarely bare fruit, rather they fail or actively harm society. Often enough, the damages are downplayed while the pretend benefits are over-hyped.
- Money flows to the where it is used most productively and actual work gets done, regardless of political desires or national boundaries.
- All funds are fungible. Government spending seduces private players to not spend their own money. Private players benefit from public spending while pocketing the profits. And they work little to produce results, but hard to find excuses to receive more Government assistance.
PM Modi’s gargantuan plans lack one ingredient: Skilled workers! Who will conduct research, write software, design hardware or assemble machines? Government bureaucrats, party-workers, farmers, Hindutva zealots or Bollywood actors won’t accomplish that job. International companies may outsource their low-quality work to India, but they still invest in the UK, US or Israel for high-end research. And other places in the world already offer a cheaper labor-force (along with more business-friendly policies).
Countries need high-quality economic growth generated through Research and Development. For R&D-driven growth a country needs plenty of skilled workers, because a high supply of skilled workers translates into low salaries for each of them. Low salaries for skilled workers keeps cost of R&D low and makes the nation more attractive for investment. Without high supply of skilled workers there is no high-quality-economic-growth, then all that spending ends up generating low-quality growth by subsidizing cheap labor to remain cheap: a sure path into a dept-ridden middle-income-trap.
The PM needs to drop everything and reform the Achilles-heal of the nation: the failing education-system. While the vital reforms of the farm-, banking- and manufacturing-sector can still wait (for now), delaying reforms in the education-system risks squandering the demographic dividend that the nation loudly brags about.
- Have schools be run as Non-Government entities with a Chief Executive instead of a Headmaster. Poor parents already prefer private schools as soon as they can afford it to avoid the low quality of public schools. The shortfall of teachers in the public school-system may actually turn out to be helpful in this endeavor!
- Liberate the market for schools and colleges, so that competition may drive down prices and increase quality; after all the current list of education scams is due to low competition. Allowing foreign colleges to operate inside the nation to boost competition in the education-market is a laudable first step, but one must proceed with preschool, elementary school, high-schools, kinder-gardens and then bring employers on-board in delivering education.
- Make the private-sector play the driving role in education. Companies benefit from a large trained labor-force for the lowest price, so they have the biggest incentive to educate as many children as possible while maintaining standards in schools.
- Let schools and colleges choose their students and teachers without interference by the Government.
- Sprinkle patriotism over students to make them stay inside the nation.
- Make it abundantly clear, that student-life in college or academic titles mean nothing, but productivity means everything! Remove all politics from schools / colleges and do not allow any protests for whatever cause. Best not even have graduation-ceremonies, imprinted clothes, fancy dresses, logos, etc..
- Make the nation a place, where productive workers flourish. There shall be no place for identity-politics or jealously for those, who achieve.
Primary schools
Every child must go through 12 years of schooling from age 4 to 16.
- Limit curriculum to a few essential subjects to provide education on scale. Primary schools must focus on teaching basic knowledge about the world. People must factor in, that people forget quickly, therefor the schedule for children must not be overloaded. Job-training must be left to the colleges.
- Poor students shall receive vouchers.
- Government may define a small set of minimum standards for education, nothing more. Testing is done at the end of the semester. Parents must pay hefty fine if their children fail those tests.
- To offer parents more flexibility, a kid should attend different schools for each of the below mentioned subjects (a student would then effectively attend multiple different schools).
- Home-schooling, private tutors, etc. shall be tolerated. How a child acquires knowledge should not matter, as long as the child achieves a minimum standard defined by the Government.
- Children should be molded into critical thinkers, curious explorers, adventurous discoverers, lifelong learners and independent problem-solvers. Today’s students learn a toxic guru-mentality, where they worship their parents and teachers, not question them. A common criticism of the current education-system is that students cram useless facts into their brains to pass the next test. Facts are important, but the trick is to combine facts-learning with solving complex tasks, for which these facts are required; that way a child experiences the reward for his or her efforts and finds motivation for continues learning¹.
STEM
Economies grow thanks to science, technology, engineering and math. The focus should be less on learning random facts and more on the scientific method to generate knowledge themselves. Math should be the main topic: algebra, calculus, statistics, geography, mechanics, electromagnetism, evolution, astronomy, the periodic table, etc.. Students should learn some python to engage in research coding.
Languages
Mother-tongue (Tamil, Marathi, Hindi, Rajasthani, etc.) and English shall be the only languages (both in speech and script). Hindi, Sanskrit or any other foreign language aren’t really needed in a world where English is essentially the second mother-tongue.
Social science
This subject should include value of democracy, value of capitalism, economics, financial markets, national and world politics / history / geography, etc.. One purpose is to teach how to identify strong-man or populist messaging.
Athletics
Running, swimming, workout, self-defense, bicycling, etc.. There should be some aspects of Military training. As they say: A strong mind can only exist in a strong body. Children must also learn about how to maintain a healthy diet and lifestyle.
Civic education
A 2-month civic education-course in Primary school is to teach manners, decency, sex-education, etc.: Those skills are as essential as technical skills to being a productive and functioning member of society. Civic education can not happen in Home-schooling, it needs to happen in school with other children.
Colleges
The college-system should resemble the German-style dual-vocational-training-system. This system puts the future employers, not the Government, in charge of managing the colleges.
- The beauty of this system is that it produces workers with exactly the skills employers need.
- Such a system is less costly than the traditional colleges, too. Employers have an incentive to keep curriculum as lean as possible to keep education cost-effective and efficient.
- More over, such a system shortens the time to market for commercial applications of scientific breakthroughs, because industry is intertwined with colleges to a much higher degree as it is the case with traditional colleges.
The US and Spain have begun to copy that system.
- A student would apply for a scholarship from an employer with the prospect of being hired by the same after education has been successfully finished.
- The employer then assesses which training is required and then selects a suitable college. If the employer concludes, that the student does not need training by college, the student can start working right away.
- To achieve a diploma it should not take more than 2 to 3 years. The courses should be inter-meshed with internships.
There is no need for any other kind of higher education! In Germany this form of education outperforms any other form already.
- The goal of college is to produce productive workers, not a permanent student-class. Colleges should aim to reduce the time spend in college to bare minimum to create skilled workers as fast as possible.
- Name-recognition of a college shall be irrelevant. There is no need for an Indian version of Oxford or Cambridge, as long as the college produces productive workers. A nation needs valuable companies, not glamorous colleges. Especially the debate surrounding legacy students provoked questions about the merit of those attending Ivy-League-Colleges or the actual value of tuition at these institutions.
- College-education shall become an on-demand-service to train workers with exactly the skills for their next step of the career ladder and an agile work-force adaptable to swift changes in the labor-market.
- Overeducation must be prevented, since education is costly and even harmful to society.
- Society needs to appreciate on-the-job-training, job-experience and useful skills over formal education, (useless) certificates and the allure of fancy titles. One must think of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg; neither attended college (succeeding without a college-degree is far more impressive than attending years of college).
- Abandon no longer contemporary titles like ‘Bachelor’, ‘Master’, ‘PhD’, ‘MD’, ‘Prof’ or any other academic title: Those titles excel in producing a huge sense of entitlement, glamour-seeking and ghost-writing rather than skilled workers; a simple diploma at the end suffices.
- Universities may focus on research, colleges on teaching. Mixing research with teaching traditionally led to a neglect of teaching, since a talented researcher isn’t automatically an enthusiastic teacher.
- Colleges should only be a place for learning, not for student-politics, sports, parties or enlightenment.
College Trusts
Employers of different sizes can organize in a Trust, which manages the colleges on behalf of the employers. They should also manage education of STEM and Languages in Primary schools, because employers also have a self-interest to teach STEM and Languages on a high level. College-Trusts are also in charge to grant the before mentioned scholarships.
Despite attempts to move global supply-chains into India this nation failed to become the next manufacturing hub. The investment-program for domestic chip-manufacturing is to disguise the failure to develop a trained labor-force, that would entice private players to invest their own money. Higher degree of connectivity in commerce is welcome only, if the nations involved behave as equal partners with similar economic strength, otherwise it becomes the dumping ground for western goods. The Deputy PM of Russia rejected the idea of the Rupee as exchange currency already, because one can buy nothing of value with the Rupee, since India doesn’t produce anything worth buying. By now the PM properly realized, that all those useless Government-bureaucrats are not going to fix the economy; neither will Indians abroad. The current low rate of educated and employable people is a source of political instability.
So far PM Modi failed to liberate the education system, produce more smart people and create an environment where smart people want to live in. The only people then praising the PM will be foreigners, who end up receiving all that Government spending. Without reform, this nation will become the next China, Türkiye or Japan.
¹ Economic growth rarely comes from working longer or harder, but by scientific breakthroughs as well as changing the processes of assembling goods or delivering services in order to make them more efficient; for both workers must learn to constantly question the status-quo.
