Every child is a born genius. He is gifted with potential in certain areas. He comes with a “right to earn a successful life” and the education system must enable him to do so. The basic purpose of education and training is to empower an individual to lead a successful life and contribute best to himself, family, society, nation and humanity. Therefore education and training are the most effective tools to achieve this outcome.
The basic purpose of education and training is to empower an individual to lead a successful life and contribute best for him, family, society, and nation and to humanity. Education must unleash the true potential of a student by recognizing and actualizing it. Unfortunately, the Indian education system does not recognize that each student has “wings” and does not kill him/her up to “fly high”.
According to a new World Bank Report, “Low education outcome and poor quality of education are the biggest impediments to the faster economic growth of a country as the young continue to be trapped in poverty”.
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Youth: Asset of nation
Since youth are the main asset of any nation, education becomes the most powerful tool for social transformation. India’s demographic structure is changing, while the world grows older, the Indian population is becoming younger and by 2025 about two-third Indians will be in its workforce. A continuously growing older world offers a huge opportunity for talented and competent.
To make the best national gains from this transition, the youth have to be prepared by higher quality education to make them most productive; hence, the system needs to be transformed.
Our current system of education comes from the Prussian system which was designed to create good employees and obedient soldiers, who blindly follow orders and always need to be instructed. This system was not designed to teach students to think.
A few pertinent questions are:
(i) Whether India’s higher education is “relevant to the era”?
(ii) Why should a student pay for education, when he is unable to earn his livelihood after getting his ‘Degree’?
(iii) Why should a student attend classes, when more updated knowledge is available to him via outside resources?
Answers to the questions above will not be encouraging and positive. In India approx 904 universities and more than 47,000 colleges are operating like ‘degree producing factories’, not bothering about the employability of their students, even as the country tries to keep pace with the fast-paced information revolution, especially when the world recognizes those equipped with relevant knowledge and technologies, and competencies and skills to apply them.
Indian universities are not exactly the hotbeds of great ideas, innovation and entrepreneurial activities whereas globally, universities are a big source of new ideas and innovations. With entrepreneurship emerging as a preferred choice, the education system must have enabling provisions in its syllabus to encourage the development of the entrepreneurial mindset.
Future of jobs:
The World Economic Forum @ Davos-2016 announced the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and predicted ‘major shift about the future of jobs’. Disruptive technologies, driven by Industry 4.0 have begun adding more fire to already volatile, uncertain, complex & ambiguous world and impacting our lives, our relationships, also the future of our jobs.
The technological breakthrough is rapidly shifting the frontiers between the work task performed by humans and those performed by machines. In 2018, an average of 71 percent of the total task was performed by humans in industries across 12 selected sectors; but by 2022 it is expected to reduce to just 58 percent.
Therefore, increasingly more jobs are likely to be taken over by machines. However, not all is gloomy – a new set of jobs expected to emerge where Human skills and EQ will be most important and valued. As machine intelligence rises, education needs to produce better human competence to drive MI and AI.
Industry 4.0 is defined by Connected Cyber-physical systems, powered by IoT and fueled by data, create a fully interconnected society. In such a hyper-connected disruptive world, Education has no option but to adapt to these changes in Industry which are brought by disruptive technologies – Hello! Education 4.0.
About Education 4.0
Technical evolution, and therefore the rest of the industries also, is taking place at such an accelerated pace that change is now measured in years (sometimes months) and not centuries. We are at a cusp of change where the learner is at the centre of a futuristic ecosystem – “Education 4.0”.
Education 4.0 will require gradual paradigm shifts:
- Demand-led instead of supply-led education
- Competency-based instead of knowledge-based
- Incorporate disruptive technologies &skill-sets
- Lifelong learning instead of front-loaded learning
- Modular Degree instead of one-shot going
- Emphasis on EQ than IQ alone
- Focus on purposefulness, mindfulness leading to overall Happiness & Wellbeing as conclusively established in global research of OECD learning framework2030.
Since Education 4.0 denotes changes, relevant to Industry 4.0 and since it is in response to the global call for action by World Economic Forum – the Industry can expect better-prepared workforce, students will have better employability and better preparation for future with a better return expectation on educational investment. Education 4.0 is aimed at improving the productivity of an employee, improving the competitiveness of the industry. It aims to improve the productive and competitive capacity of the country as a whole. Such a system where creativity and innovativeness of the human brain are improved will make educated students more prepared for an uncertain and volatile future. Thus, with Education 4.0 the students, the Industry and the Country will be able to reap the dividends better in times of Fourth Industrial Revolution.
[“source=indiatoday”]