Notes on Education

Graduate of UBC An Open Letter to The Right Honorable Smriti Z. Irani, Minister for HRD Government of India Dear Minister, Please accept my congratulations at your new appointment. Many highly educated Indians and academics including myself are highly excited and pleased in finally seeing an energetic and capable young Minister for education in India. Unfortunately it has not always been so in India and as a result, standards of education have suffered. It may be mentioned that this letter comes to you from a person who has attained the highest levels of formal education, from the finest of universities as available in our world. These include the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi for a bachelors plus masters degree (with distinction and top rank) and doctor’s degree from the University of British Columbia in Canada on a doctoral fellowship of the university. Later, there was good fortune to serve on the faculty of these esteemed unive

W ith progress of science and knowledge one would have expected that standard of basic arithmetic of school children too would have improved. However, surprisingly, this is one area where instead of improvement deterioration appears to have taken place in recent decades. Several surveys carried out in different parts of the world indicate that while children are becoming better at electronic things like computers, their most basic arithmetic skills are deteriorating. Even fourth or fifth graders are lagging behind in basic skills such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of numbers. A review of the scenario by this author seems to indicate that a primary reason for this is the fact that curriculums have been expanded much too rapidly with the consequence that far too much knowledge is being thrust upon youngest of children leaving them disinterested in the subject. Attempts have been made to include algebra at elementary school level as well as concepts from s