The interesting story of our educational system | Adhitya Iyer | TEDxCRCE

organizers last year got like the CEO of JPMorgan and the police commissioner and this year they got a massive goofballs in me however now that I am here I am going to tell you about the world's most interesting educational story cool before I start I want to play a game all right what I'm going to do is I am going to take you through a bunch of seemingly random Indian celebrities and I want you to tell me what all of them have in common can we do this ma'am can be super let's do it this young and I must admit extremely charming Bollywood actors this veteran politician this acclaimed economist and this emerging young cricketer anyone Oh lovely he is right they are all engineers by education cool right in fact let me share with you some fascinating insight ever since our independence in 1947 we produce zero Nobel laureates in science the u.s. has 100 plus 26 Olympic medals that said just 26 Olympic medals and China produced 100 in the 2008 games alone however however there is something we produced more than the US and China combined anyone's guess right number of Engineers now Who am I and why and how do I know so much look he's laughing he's he's an engineer himself so Who am I and why and how do I know so much about the story so so I spent my initial years of growing in Saudi Arabia right and then my parents packed me back to Bombay and you of better education and in school I made two big mistakes do you want to know what those mistakes are yeah okay so the first mistake of my life was that I was good at studies okay the second mistake of my life was I was particularly good at math now in India when you commit these two mistakes you end up committing a third mistake by default which is you get into engineering exactly what I did now in engineering life I kind of realized early on it wasn't quite my thing right so I founded this t-shirt start-up in case you can't recognize me that that's me without all the beard so I founded this t-shirt startup to vent my frustration and for which I was listed as one of India's top student entrepreneurs later on I moved to the city of Bangalore where I spent a solid two years essentially selling child now here's the thing about Bangalore all right Bangalore is full of engineers okay and they are not just engineers they are engineers frustrated with their lives now it's not funny so one in every 20 IT employees in Bangalore contemplate suicide at some point of his life crazy right now what happened next is I quit my job because I was curious like how did such a diverse country like us get so obsessed with one thing producing engineers and look like nobody before me tried answering so I quit my job and then something magical happened some 300 people across the globe contributed 14,000 Australian dollars in a record-setting crowdfunding campaign to help me the goofball compiled a book ok so over the next two years I found out about a lot of interesting people places and events that helped shaped what I call one of India's greatest obsessions now it's going to be difficult for me to take you through like 2 years of research in a couple of minutes right so what I'm going to do is going to take you through some of these people some of these places and some of these events ok are you ready can we start okay so the first person I'm going to tell you about is this very very interesting character who goes by the name thomas babington macaulay now my colleague was born genius he had an estimated IQ of four like what 180 to 190 he had the tremendous ability to learn any language within a fortnight okay so the Brits told him dude like you know India is one of our newer colonies and one of our more important colonies why don't you go there and you know he'll figure a few things for us so he said India there is no way I am going to India so then the dude can you please do this for us so Macaulay didn't have a lot of friends okay and he was nearly attached to his sister's so he pleaded with a certain Hanna saying the Hanna these guys want me to go to India can you please come I don't want to go alone so Hanna said and I quote I see India only as a country of filth and disease so this is what the British did next they said okay fine we'll give you ten thousand pounds which in today's time translate to half a million pound now face it if somebody gave me half a billion pound right now I'd be willing to go to North Korea hey so so this guy forcibly got his sister to India and he roughly spent four years in India did not bother learning a single Indian language went back to the Britain Parliament okay and on 2nd of February 1835 made a very momentous speech which I am NOT going to quote entirely but I'm just going to pick up one line which kind of summarizes the spirit of the entire speech Macaulay said and I quote we need to teach Indians English if we do not teach them English they are going to waste their youth touching a cow's ass this is what he said and taught us that's how English education came to India now what does English education have to do with the life of India's engineers right a couple of things one a vast majority of India's engineers are actually unemployable do you know why anyone from the industry that probably know why what what's lacking the most anyone lovely yeah close enough spork so they don't call it that they call poor communication skills right poor communication skills innuendo for you know poor English and common English is international language and it's an acquired language so English became a class in India then just become a language secondly this very important IT revolution to which so many of Indian engineers were lives too and also a first foreign trip to happen in India and not in China you know why because of her familiarity with English just because we were acquainted with English could be you know able to code easily and also talk to our clients and Europe and America cool right now now that I mentioned America let's discuss the Indian engineers tremendous success story in the US tech industry so beat this right two of the biggest tech giants in the world are today run by Indian engineers and you know they actually owe their life to a very specific moment in history that moment is actually as specific as this fourth of October 1957 728 p.m. okay so what happened on 4th of October 1957 728 p.m. is the Soviets launched the first human satellite in space the Sputnik and the u.s. lost lost its mind you know the US and Russia always have had this Indian student type have been like two Indian students right always want to do better than each other so so the Americans lost the man and they said dude you know do something man so they changed their entire immigration policy and they invited the best of scientists the best of doctors and the best of engineers from across the globe now engineers back in India were pretty brainy are rather still pretty brainy and say and they were frustrated with India socialist regime back then because it didn't allow them to do much the government controlled practically everything so they had two options okay one was to go with a best friend forever BFF as they say these days BFF Russia or to go to America with whom we didn't have the best of relations at least back then but what happened was something curious most engineers ditched their best friends Russia and all went to most of the men to America instead anyone tell me why anyone know my college English because we were comfortable speaking in English like the Americans did all of them moved to America and rest is history right the earliest bunch of engineers who went to America did extremely well not just for themselves but also for America and then paved the way for future engineers to come from India so much so that kids these days actually take up engineering so that they can go to the US that's the easiest ticket to the US right in fact you won't believe this and I am not exaggerating okay there are communities in South India they're communities in South India that educate the sons in engineering send them to the US just so that they can come and hide Audi because us return has a lot of command supposedly in their community a lot of dowry right now moving from the u.s. coming back to India and to my favorite three-letter word the IITs now see now if you're Indian I'm not going to bother you know introducing the IITs to you but what I'm going to tell you instead is how American American youth broadcaster once introduced the IITs to it's you know viewers in America and listen to us carefully okay listen to it carefully it said and I am quoting we import oil from Saudi Arabia cars from Japan television from Korea and whiskey from Scotland so what do we import from India we import people some really really smart people and all these people seem to share a common credential they are all graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology or the IITs as they are known now when you s compare something to oil you know it has to be valuable right and in fact it's not just valuable to them valuable to our society to the extent that once this affluent woman in Delhi accompanied by her equally affluent father took her son to the den director of IIT Delhi he care and requesting for an admission of course so now the father got slightly embarrassed so he left the room the father left the room and and then the director saw this kids report car and he said I'm sorry ma'am I can't get your kid into the IITs however I can get him into the Imperial College of London which eventually did so you know what's fascinating about the story the characters in world does anyone want to take a guess as to who the characters are I will tell you Indira Gandhi Pandit Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi the most powerful family in the country can be denied admission into the IIT now where I'm coming from is what happened gradually that you know in the society that weeks of corruption in everyday life the IITs became one of those very few meritorious institutions for the Indian middle class you know for the social upliftment that is one second what also happened is for the longest time the IITs were essentially IITs or other engineering colleges were essentially the only Institute's which offered quality education of any kind right so eventually you know the Indian middle class decided to take put their kids into the IITs or dig up other engineering courses now if something Bollywood has taught me okay is that every great obsession has an equally fascinating chase be it women or be it engineering so my journey took me to a lot of these places of which I'm going to tell you about to two very interesting places the first one is the city of Hyderabad so these images that you see are from one of the student hostels that managed to get rare access to I'll tell you why rare because these kids are disconnected absolutely disconnected from the outside world I am not kidding if the aliens were to invade us right now there would be the last people to know guys and girls aren't allowed to talk to each other they are suspended they're caught talking right the sole purpose of their life is to study and get through a good engineering college in fact you won't believe this and it's you know the funniest part is whatever I am saying may sound funny and that's the funniest part this guy left all his belongings and ran for his life out of the campus nobody knows where he went nobody knows what he did he just ran out of this madness seriously now from Hyderabad let's go up north to this interesting city called Kanpur okay now in Kanpur there is this small locality that's called coaching Mundi because there are so many coaching classes there so the locals call it coaching Mundi he care so then I got talking to a local Pamela and I said you know can you tell me the origins of this place and history and how did it start so it only there was this old professor who started coaching kids into engineering colleges and gradually everyone followed and it became like a big business I'm like cool so tell him camp where can i you know see the old man he said and I quote servo to opera milling income murder asuka and and for the U P girls murder murder root you guys like one of those things right that that keep happening in fact not just that it so this place is actually you know a hot pot for gang wars between coaching professors who shoot each other dead Auto rivalry right just kidnap and threw them dead but this isn't really the sort of death that worries me the most let me tell you what does you know this young girl could you know like most teenagers have had her share of man crushes listen to her whatever music could have been part of this audience today or seen this video later on YouTube but the sad part is she is no more right and she is no more only because she didn't want to become an engineer and she isn't really alone India has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world 20 kids kill themselves every day mostly due to academic pressure in fact God knows by the time I talk is over some kids somewhere must try you know killing himself for killing herself crazy society we live in right anyway let's get out of this gloom and I will show you one of my more relatable illustrations from the book so here you see a young boy called moans occur all who back in 2003 goes to his parents and tell him tell him that mom dad you have this fantastic idea I want to create something called as a social network and I think it's going to change the world obviously Indian parents think that he's possessed probably by a ghost get a haven't done get him into an engineering college and today moans or Carville is probably a mid-level IT manager contemplating suicide in Bangalore but you know every story has a villain know every story has a villain so I was trying to find out the biggest villain of my story and I search for really long and guess where I found it right behind me with the cute and innocent little face you know what that is our schools now Indian schools no matter how you look at it is easily the biggest human resource tragedy in the world I can assure you but the biggest tragedy actually lies in its design right now if you look at it how did our schools come into being No our schools are actually more than 400 years old so the Empire 400 years ago basically needed three kinds of people right they needed clerks to manage their territories military guys to protect their territories and they needed factory workers because Industrial Revolution had to started and what are the kind of skill set that these factory workers or these three kind of people require no creativity these are required skills are no creativity listen to instructions right so it is actually no coincidence that uh schools the model on the factory like exactly how a factor is modeled right right from if I can give you an analogy right from the tinkling of the Bell right in the factories to symbolize that you know it's lunch your can go get out a factory and go and eat your food to the grouping of kids it's based on the age and not the learning ability test and the point of a test is not to assess your kids strengths and weakness but to actually certify them as okay or fail just like in factories you know it's clear if we don't really fix our schools India has a large student base in the world and if you don't fix a school of these kids are going to look the same boring dull and uninspiring right now unless we fix our schools in India you will always become an engineer first and then decide what to do with your life and with all the chaos tragedy death blood the life of India's engineers will continue to remain the world's most interesting educational story thank you so much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 2,981,897

Rating: 4.8975163 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, India, Education, Change, Education reform, Students

Id: Fw1Fc_y_2Ek

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/soldier_boldiya]

In India, one becomes an engineer first, then does an MBA, and later joins a company as HR.

[u/bhen_ka_lauda]

Bhot purana hai ye toh

[u/lord_giggle_goof]

What else is new?

[u/SouthieSaar]

This is a pretty common saying in Bangalore.

[u/110011001100]

deleted ^{What is this?}

[u/gopi526]

Absolutely correct

[u/guru_modicum]

That's the kulcha