Indian education system has to create new trends by looking at how the finest systems of education have evolved over a period of time in various countries across the world. Education empowers each of us with a vision to actualize a new mission by dismantling the ancient stigmas of social or cultural exclusivity in the domain of our career choice. However, such streams of innovative integration just limit our scope sometimes without any sort of skill mapping done right at the start of one’s primary education or upper primary education.
Career choice is to be based on one’s absolute expertise or passion to excel in the area of one’s preference. Do we provide such specialist counselling for our children to choose their career? Many children feel a bit reluctant to follow the footsteps of their parents, though some of them do well in family businesses. We may need to respect the reasoning of our children and make them good decision-makers by training them to come to terms with their strengths and weaknesses.
Individual counselling and skill mapping could be done with professional psychologists or our teachers with exposure to learner psychology and career counselling at the school level. At the same time, any sort of psychological exploitation done in the name of counselling must be curbed immediately. We may have an elderly person or a guardian accompanying the candidate or sometimes to oversee the process from a distance without any interception. The institution may opt to record the entire process with prior consent of all the stakeholders if ever required.
Most of the schools can think about having an MOU with some institutions of skill development, wherein the domain of skill mapping is to be done systematically with the list of micro-skills. It is significant for our nation to have an independent skill assessment agency monitoring the process of skill mapping of every learner/student in our schools and colleges. The professional and intellectual evolution of a person occurs only when there is an expert guidance and counselling rendered at the appropriate time. Most of us have had such teachers, who transformed our behaviour, attitude and learning potential with extraordinary motivation throughout our school education and even at the level of our tertiary education.
Individualized learning is extremely important and thereby makes every child to discover new dimensions of learning with clarity if counselling a learner is useful to choose the finest learning strategies and learning resources. Most of us do not attach any systematic analysis of learning solutions used by the target group of learners. Young learners ought to be motivated quite often whenever they face learning difficulties in order to overcome such hurdles in the process of learning the target language/subject.
Our learning systems ought to be in a complete sync with the evolving systems of work through interdependence and immediate actualization of new age processes and priorities. Do we really see the significance of internships being used as a tool to mentor the younger generation today? It might be highly challenging for someone to do a task without much of training and experience. Most of the universities in the United Kingdom and the USA besides several European countries advocate the need to have a judicious mix of practical hands-on experience along with the course rubrics mastered by a graduate student. A few of our universities have gone for it, but others remain in quagmire.
It may be a little disturbing, even if all of them opt for internships. Do we have enough opportunities for youngsters to learn by doing with the help of benevolent or generous industries? It is a fact that a few universities and colleges have a formal MOUs with some industries to provide quite a healthy taste of workplace atmosphere and realistic experience for each of their participants. However, most of them never think about the changing dynamics of work and real-time challenges that these naïve rather inexperienced graduates may face all of a sudden while getting into work. Why don’t we involve our budding engineers in the production processes or any other phase of a product design or development in general?
Our career gets transformed through continuous exposure to modern workplace and its imminent benefits and threats too. We might not live in oblivion of how career marathon of a career is feasible for a few who have never switched to any other role within an organization for a long time or how else someone has evolved so smoothly over several tides and whirlwinds of workplace politics or even poor payment especially in a vocation such as nursing/teaching/healing in this country. It is similar to Bodhisattva’s final words to the most peculiar group of his followers, who have considered him a failure rather than a mystic exploring the world of wonders in our mundane existence. Bodhisattva’s answer symbolizes “nothingness” in its truest sense. We create meanings through our actions in career and life. Democracy becomes meaningless if we don’t learn to respect the difference of opinion or ideology. Nothing remains the same in the realm of boundless nature.
We are wedded to our ideological stances but our posterity ought to know how we have learnt to cohabit with several insurmountable conflicts in a swift fashion. Social harmony is the breath of our well-being. Conflagrant moments may not be the easy way out for all, as we tend to dwell upon the right alignment with whomsoever is responsible for a particular process or project. It is deemed significant for the freshers to take stock upon the prevalence of performance-based leadership in our industries and other organizations as well. Our great convergence bridges the gap between the process of industrialization and digitization in innumerable ways across the world. The birth of artificial intelligence has simplified the complexity of business analytics and thereby rendered new means of redesigning the business outputs. Internships are certainly going to be the bedrocks of our futuristic thinking in education.
Mangalaprathaban Muralidharan is proprietor, Fluency Centre, Coimbatore.