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“Sorry for being weak, and not showing courage, but I am tired now, no strength left.” This is what Kriti Tripathi an intelligent, enterprising, IIT JEE aspirant wrote in a five-page suicide letter that exposed the tremendous emotional cost at which our children are increasingly adopting their parents dream as their own. Is IITs the only way to succeed in Engineering?
Venkat Ramakrishnan, the 2009 Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry, was an IIT-reject. He settled for physics at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Satya Nadella is not from any of the IITs, the legendary Vinod Dham; the “father of the Pentium chip” went to Delhi College of Engineering. So, that settles the question on the importance of IITs for your Engineering career, but then raises another question in our mind. Are STEM courses the only way to career success?
When we look around us, do we see many people with non-STEM background who have earned name, fame and wealth? Do we see wealth creation only around products that relies solely on STEM subject expertise?
While he was unveiling iPad, Steve Jobs explained that “it’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — that its technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yield us the result that makes our hearts sing.”
We are all familiar with the huge success story of Facebook, but Mark Zuckerberg who founded it was a classic liberal arts student majoring in psychology with a deep interest in computer science. We all know that Facebook’s innovations have a lot to do with psychology. In Zuckerbeg’s own words, Facebook is “as much psychology and sociology as it is technology.”
So, there we have our answer that there are many avenues, be it cooking, travelling, writing, singing, dancing, storytelling, design or anthropology where one can embrace his passion to make it a hugely successful career. Then why are we forcing our children to swim against the tide of their own passions to chase dreams that they don’t connect with emotionally. Why are we trying to put a square peg in a round hole?
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, recently said in a speech that the Chinese lag behind western countries in innovation and creativity because China’s educational system, which teaches the basics very well, does not nourish a student’s complete intelligence, allowing her to range freely, experiment and enjoy herself while learning. This is true for most of the Asian education systems, including India.
The problem is not the lack of avenues as we have argued through earlier but it is the lack of knowledge and confidence that there are other ways. This prompts parents to choose the safe way and the safe way is to push their kids through IITs and IIMs. The million dollar question is, how exactly do we address this issue?
Jeanne Piaget, the psychologist famous for his theories on cognitive development, says that the pre-adolescent stage, particularly when a student is in 5th or 6th class, is when he is developing a thought process that is mature and adult like. This is the stage when we should take an active interest in how her innate abilities are being transformed into capabilities that would later on define success, passion and a meaningful life for her.
Does technology have a role to play in this journey? Can it help a child discover where her passion lies and what she is born for? Can it prevent her from being diverted by contextual pressures posed by the society and family to abandon her true passion and competence in favour of a safe path to success? The answer is yes.
The answer involves capturing and recording skills, traits, habits, interests early on from her interaction with a technology platform which may be in a formal or informal setup. It may even be an assessment or gaming engine with which the child starts her interaction early on and continues for a long period of time.
Such an assessment engine can systematically capture data about the child and use data science to analyse and update the stake-holders at any point of time towards the possible avenues which would fit her interest and passion and where she would demonstrate excellence.
The good news is that the technology and these products are already available. There are many companies which have made long strides into assessment and skill mapping. TCYonline has been one of the pioneer companies in India to start capturing data on the development stages of students from class III onwards to give stakeholders a complete insight into how the learner’s skills have been evolving over the period of time and towards what future it is leading. This ensures that whenever a child is taking an important decision, she is doing it in a scientific way with full knowledge of her strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.
It wouldn’t be long before technology would transform the way we think of our children’s careers and diminish the relevance of degrees and bring to forefront individual excellence, passion and creativity in different areas as the criteria for success.
Let’s hope to raise a nation of happy kids chasing their true dreams and passion. Let us aspire to be a super powerhouse of human innovation and spirit. Let us leverage technology and assessment to help us achieve it! We are determined “to help every learner become what s/he is born for.”
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tcy@tcyonline.com
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