Importance of Learning Life Skills
There are number of reasons I can outline here which are the causes of this high amount of unemployment or under employment. One of the reasons I would like to highlight is the lack of basic “LIFE SKILL†development in our Indian curriculum.
#lifeskills #indianeducationsystem
Author : Reji Varghese
Reji M Varghese is a Post graduate Electrical Engineer from MANIT Bhopal (India) with his Under Graduate Engineering degree from NIT Rourkela (India). In Dec 2003 he established the company ADONAI. He has overall responsibility for creating, planning, implementing and integrating the strategic direction of the organization.
As an entrepreneur I often interact with a lot of job seekers and many a time I get very disappointed when I come to realize that most of the freshers or so called experienced hands do not have the very basic “LIFE SKILLS” which they needed to have acquired during their education; leave alone the academic skills they possess. The country has as many as 6000 Engineering colleges and these institutes produce thousands of Engineers every year leaving most of them unemployed.
Brilliant and smart ones out of these thousands manage to get jobs through campus selections or through other placement services and service selection entrance examinations but the rest are left unemployed running from pillar to post for employment and they end up taking up jobs which do not require an Engineering degree or land up in companies which underpay them.
No wonder mental depressive disorders are increasing in an alarming manner among the adolescents and young adults..
There are number of reasons I can outline here which are the causes of this high amount of unemployment or under employment. One of the reasons I would like to highlight is the lack of basic “LIFE SKILL” development in our Indian curriculum.
The two year training program on Life Coaching that I had done from Symbiosis University gave me an explicit idea on how important the development of various “LIFE SKILLS” to be successful in one’s career. When I say Life Skill, I would like to put it as skills that would help us lead a quality life which in turn help us to achieve and accomplish our ambitions and LIVE LIFE KING SIZE.
The education system in our country is aimed only towards imparting bookish knowledge instead of equipping a student with the skills that he can develop to empower him to excel in the area where he is good at. “Give a man a fish and you feed him one day, teach him how to catch fishes and you feed him for a lifetime.” Once an exam is over, knowledge is forgotten till the next exam comes in. The students who can mug up the entire course books are rewarded by the system.
But we have been seeing some signs of change as the CCE (Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation) pattern of Education is being implemented in the country by CBSE and various other state boards. Kerala is one of the first states to implement this kind of an evaluation system and the other day I was talking to a friend of mine who is a teacher and as we were discussing, my friend said “any student who studies only the book content in Kerala cannot get more than 50% marks in any subject; to score high marks the student has to read outside the books and use cognitive and analytical abilities” which seemed very interesting to me.
As I tried to make some analysis on my friend’s statement, I stumbled upon a recent survey conducted by Pearson which said “92 percent of teachers are in agreement that the Education system in India focuses more on exams because of which the students are not equipped with the right, required academic, cognitive, and vocational skills. The survey also said seventy-two percent of the parents in Madhya Pradesh , put the maximum emphasis on examination results (which is the highest). In Kerala, this percentage was 61, the lowest in the country”.
As the world is fast moving towards a global village, Thomas L. Friedman in his international bestselling book “The World is Flat” analyzes globalization, primarily in the early 21st century. The book lays a great emphasis on the perceptual shift required for countries, companies, and individuals to remain competitive in a global market where historical and geographical divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
So it is the high time that we need to switch over to a new system of education which can empower every student with the required LIFE SKILL to survive in this competitive FLAT WORLD.