Education over the years in TN - Part 2

Click Part - 1 to read the first part, before continuing with Part-2.

The education system changed, but did it really meet our expectations?

As years passed by, the first change came in the form of removal of entrance examinations for the admission to colleges (medical and engineering). 

I was really shocked, as entrance exams are a means to test the competitive ability of the students and the system wants to kill the competitive spirit at the very beginning of the student’s career.

The worst part about the selection criteria is, when two or more students have the same criteria in every qualification (cut-off marks for the various subjects as prescribed) which the system expects, the allocation of seat is done on the basis of Date of Birth.

Is this a criterion to decide on the future of a student? Is it a sin that student2 was born after Student1?

As usual protests erupted to reinstate the entrance exam. The system had its counter-argument stating that the rural students do not get the opportunity and same education as that of urban students and this is the better way to create equal opportunities for them.

Whose mistake is this, if students in urban area gets more opportunity than rural?

Just because few people in the system are lazy and do not want to take efforts to develop rural areas, will they start adopting backward integration?


The protest fell on deaf ears as the entrance exam pattern was completely abolished.


Is this a positive change??? Never, not even in the slightest of my dreams. 

The odds did not stop at the entrance exams. As years rolled by, change was brought in the syllabus being suggested to school children from 1^st standard to 12^th standard. The syllabus was decreased when compared to the previous years, thus impairing the roots of education.

This consideration was done based on the fact that equal education should be provided across the state, whether it be rural or urban area. 
If equal opportunity has to be provided, why not the infrastructure be provided to rural areas and improve the quality of education being provided to them? This shows the inconsistency of the system to function properly. 


This has taken away the opportunity for the students to learn the basics in their respective subjects. Even though people know that these drastic steps decrease the quality of education than improving, still they do not give a damn to it.

The worst part of this type of education is the lack of practical knowledge. Our students have bookish knowledge and the question papers are nothing but a repetitive of questions, which has been taught in class. Even a slight deviation or twist in the questions, would make the students to score less marks or even fail, which indicates how the education has ruined the thinking capabilities of the students.

The fundamentals should be instilled in the minds right from the young age itself. Not all people are born creative. It is their environment that makes them to think creative. One part of this environment is the education. 
Our education system is framed in such a way that “Out of the box thinking” is discouraged right from their childhood.

I am not against the upliftment of education in rural areas. I am here to support the improvements that need to be done in rural areas to catch up with the urban areas. The system should think of ways to implement an improved education system in rural areas in a phased manner, rather than degrading the quality of the education as a whole.

With an education system as such existing in the state, can we expect the future of the students to be good enough to cope up with the challenges?

Education over the years in TN - Part 1

Having seen the change in education system over the years in Tamil Nadu, I got that inner urge to write this blog.

It was the year 2002. We have completed 12^th standard and there were a bunch of guys (including me), who wanted to pursue their career in medicine. We prepared for our Tamil Nadu entrance exams and due to additional awareness, we got to know about the existence of medical colleges across India such as AFMC, AIMS, JIPMER. As any other aspirants would do, we applied for those exams and even bought books to prepare for those exams.

We were very confident enough to excel well in those exams, as we considered the syllabus for biology in our education system to be vast. 

To our dismay, we were not even able to answer 10% of the questions mentioned in those books. The syllabus given in those books looked like French & German to us, as the biology syllabus in those books was way ahead of what we studied in our state syllabus.

There, we realized the difference between the real (education outside TN) and imaginary (education in TN) world. What we consider as too much of syllabus in TN is nothing but a meagre syllabus for a student outside TN. Still we prepared and wrote those exams, but never cleared any of those, as “hinky pinky ponky” technique never helps you in the real world.

In marketing, we have a famous term named “Moment of Truth” – The time when the customer forms his opinion about the firm, when he interacts with the products of the firm. Moment of Truth for us is the interaction with the medical exams of the real world and we realized that we were “Kinathu thavalai (Frog in a well – A frog inside a well thinks that there doesn’t exist a world beyond the well)” till then.

Once the results for the entrance exams were out, we faced the truth that it is time to change the ambition of your life. This, not only happened with us, but with many other fellow students, who appear for 12^th standard exams every year. We did not had the guts to study for an additional year to prepare for the exams again, as it is considered a curse, as every other person whom you can find, whether educated or not, would advice you saying that you have wasted a year. 

We expected the mindset of the people to change over the years, thereby giving rays of hope to the education system.

As expected our education system changed, but ………..


Click Part-2 to read the continuation.

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