12 Months of Coaching vs 12 Years of Schooling: The Hidden Truth Nobody Talks About

Each morning, in towns and big-city corridors, millions of children will slip on freshly ironed uniforms, strap on their backpacks, and hop on yellow school buses. They will continue to do this for twelve long years. Their parents will continue to empty their life savings into tuition fees, infrastructure taxes, uniforms, transport, and annual activity funds.

After 12 Years of School, the Real Panic Begins

But the day these children finish their twelfth standard, the terror begins for their parents. Suddenly, all those years of books, lab practicals, home assignments, parent-teacher meetings, and result-day tension feel like a mockery. All the burdens of the child’s future are now handed over to a completely unaccountable and unregulated parallel education industry: the coaching centers. Families who have already bled money to keep their child in school somehow manage to shell out thousands, lakhs, or even crores more on coaching institutes, crash courses, and repeat batches for their sons and daughters.

What Have We Turned Education Into?

What does this say about our education system that makes families feel like their children cannot survive without a year-long ‘crash course’ of relentless, nerve-wracking, and physically abusive coaching? What does it say about our schools that makes families feel like they need to invest in separate, independent coaching for a single competitive examination? What does it say about our economy that makes families feel like they need to drain their life savings for an examination that is nothing more than a gatekeeping device? And finally, what does it say about our children that we have made them mentally infirm and hollow by reducing their lives to an annual examination?

1. The Basic Problem: Different Objectives Behind Schools & Competitive Exams

School education is an egalitarian and inclusive public good. By design, the objective of school education is to ensure general competence and a baseline level of intellectual and social maturity. Within a class of forty or fifty students, there are diverse needs and abilities, and the school’s objective is to cater to the widest possible variation in learning outcomes. Schools reward descriptive, verbose answers, lengthy calculations, verbose essays on subjective topics, and rote-based learning of basic facts and figures. A school board examination is designed in a manner to ensure that most students pass it.

Competitive Exams Are Built to Eliminate, Not Educate

A competitive examination, on the other hand, is designed to fulfill a completely different objective – one that is almost the reverse of schools. Because there are far fewer seats than there are students, any competitive examination is primarily a culling mechanism. The basic objective of such exams is to minimize the number of students who qualify. The math of it is straightforward – if two million candidates appear for the exam, and only twenty thousand seats are available, ninety-nine percent of them must be culled.

Speed and Shortcuts Over Understanding: What Competitive Exams Really Reward

Such an exam, therefore, rewards students not for descriptive or verbose skills, but for a mastery of objective-type questions. A competitive exam tests a student’s ability to solve a physics problem faster than others by using a particular shortcut, or by eliminating three incorrect options through logical deduction.

The Market Gap That Created the Coaching Industry

The reason why coaching centers have been so phenomenally successful is that schools are unable to fulfill this role of a culling mechanism due to their egalitarian design philosophy. To fulfill this perceived gap in the market, coaching centers promised to provide specialized training to students in order to help them ‘clear’ a competitive examination by using objective-type questions. Coaching centers focus on developing pattern recognition skills in students by studying previous years’ question papers and developing heuristics to solve a range of questions.

The Myth of “Making Students Smart”

They train students to solve multiple-choice questions under extreme mental pressure through weekly mock tests. When students subsequently ‘clear’ a competitive exam, the general consensus is that the coaching institute has done a marvelous job by ‘making the student smart’, when in reality, the student has spent twelve years developing general competence at school, only to spend the next twelve months preparing to solve objective-type questions with a particular pattern.

Short-Term Skills, Long-Term Loss: The Fragile Value of Coaching

The truth is, students who spend a year in a coaching institute develop extremely specialized skills, but these skills have a shelf-life of only six months. The minute the student has cleared the desired examination, most of the techniques taught to them become completely useless. The university ends up with a student who can solve an MCQ paper in less than an hour, but has no idea how to write an essay or an open-book project on any topic.

2. Do We Really Need Schools, If We Have Competitive Exams?

A common argument made in favor of coaching institutes is that since competitive examinations determine the fate of students, why not replace school education with crash courses starting from sixth standard?

This argument leads to a scary proposition – the creation of ‘dummy’ schools, which would exist only for the purpose of providing an ‘official’ address and attendance for a student who is otherwise enrolled in a private coaching center for fourteen hours a day.

However, if we consider the long-term benefits of school education, it is clear that school-going years are critical to the intellectual and social development of a human being. If we remove the school-going years from a child’s life, we deny them the opportunity to learn social etiquette, or how to handle conflicts in a fair and moral manner. As adults, these children will be socially awkward, incapable of handling office politics, and unable to solve ethical dilemmas because they have no experience with such concepts.

3. The “Shadow Education Tax”: Parents Pay Twice For The Same Education

Unfortunately, the rise of the ‘coaching culture’ has resulted in an unfair burden being borne by the parents. Parents in our society are being forced to pay twice for the same education – once to a private school, and again to a coaching institute. Parents are being forced to take out second mortgages on their homes, or sell off ancestral land, in order to pay exorbitant fees to ‘private’ coaching institutes which promise to provide specialized training and pattern-solving skills.

We have a ‘shadow education tax’ in our country. Top coaching institutes have turned into multinational conglomerates, with large budgets, aggressive marketing, and deep pockets to hire the best teachers in the country.

This creates an unhealthy hierarchy among students. The wealthy student can afford residential coaching institutes and air-conditioned classrooms. The average student feels pressured to meet the unrealistically high expectations of his parents. The poor student is denied opportunities and a chance at a decent livelihood because he cannot afford to meet the cut-off score.

We have created a situation in which students pay a steep price to gain entry to prestigious national institutions on the basis of merit, when, in effect, they are paying for their privilege through their parents’ salaries.

4. The Manufacturing Of Intellectual Inferiority

One of the most insidious impacts of the coaching culture is the creation of an inferiority complex among students. By encouraging students to view knowledge as something that must be ‘gamed’, we have created a generation of children who are incapable of original thought. We have turned curious young minds into pattern-following, robotic test-taking machines. Some of the most damaging impacts are as follows:

The Death Of Curiosity

By training students to associate exam success with pattern-solving, we have killed the curiosity in millions of young minds. Students are no longer interested in asking ‘why’, ‘how’, or ‘what if’.

Binary Thinking

Life rarely rewards or punishes us in absolute terms. However, an examination asks us to choose between binary options, and penalizes us for choosing the wrong one. By training students to think in absolute terms, we have turned them into anxious, socially awkward conformists.

The Identity Crisis Of The 99 Percent

There is a crippling sense of defeat that comes over students who have failed at a competitive examination. Millions of young minds are discarded every year because they failed to meet the cut-off score in a single examination. This has resulted in an epidemic of depression and anxiety among students, and a staggering number of young adults commit suicide every year because they feel defeated, inadequate, and worthless.

We are not building confident young professionals. We are building anxious, robotic test-taking machines who will spend their lives answering multiple-choice questions at the expense of their creativity and individuality.

5. One Big Missing Piece – Early Channelization, Not Channeling Through One Exam

How can we solve this seemingly impossible situation?

The answer, perhaps, lies in the creation of a channelization mechanism at an early age. It is important to understand that the core problem with the current education system is that students are being forced to compete with each other on the basis of a single examination. In almost every other developed country, the equivalent of school education is completed at the age of sixteen. Thereafter, students are allowed to channel their energies based on their individual aptitude. Some pursue technical fields like engineering or nursing, while others go into management, arts, design, or computer science.

There is no examination that dictates whose future will be decided on the basis of merit. Every student is encouraged to decide their own career path. However, in order to pursue these careers, students must receive specialized training and apprenticeships in their desired field.

If we introduce such a channelization mechanism in our country, it is possible to decongest the competition in the limited number of degrees that are currently available. Schools can then be transformed into vocational training centers, instead of generalized competence-building institutions.

6. The Restoration Of The Role Of Youth

Our youth must not be sacrificed on the altar of a single examination. Twelve years of school education cannot be viewed as an expendable waste before the real twelve months of life begin. It is important for students to receive a generalized education that prepares them for a professional career, instead of being trained to answer multiple-choice questions. It is important for school education to be made relevant and meaningful, instead of being a meaningless paper qualification. And finally, it is important for higher education to be transformed, so that students can be evaluated on their professional competence, and not on their ability to ‘clear’ an examination by filling in bubbles on an OMR sheet.