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Comment by throwaway_tvs | Hacker News Reader

India's is a sad state. It is partly to do with the fact that the nation maintains (rather proudly IMO) the colonial structure of being a mere 'training ground' for Engineers and Scientists before they move to the US/UK/rem. Anglo-Saxon nations. K Vijayaraghavan, the DBT secretary, and a NAS fellow, has written a piece on the matter.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/india-must-shed-inte...

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Respectfully, it seems to me that India (and other countries in the region and maybe elsewhere) has a problem with strictly hierarchical structure, issues with accessibility and availability of resources. There is no investment in improving training for teachers. Typically, people that don't find jobs anywhere else take up teaching. Teaching is also typically a high-stress, low-paid job. It seems to have not a lot to do with language. There are more factors here.

Yes the Germans are able to get ahead cause of the use of both German and English. But it seems like lazy reasoning to suggest that this is solely the reason why they do better. How about looking into what else their education system does that is possibly absent in the Indian system? How about comparing the structure, the resource usage, the training for educators and managers in education and research? Surely, language is not the only difference between the two systems?

You might be right to the first order about language, but having a 'colonial' system is very insidious IMO.

First it means that a large fraction of the population is implicitly denied resources to develop their abilities. Second it means that people who do make it through the system (as it is) have no real incentives to stay back, neither cultural, nor fiscal, nor institutional.

Personally, none of the people I studied with/worked under ended staying in India. It's interesting that British India managed to sustain better state universities, than today.

Can I ask where there people from different castes there or is it totally ignored?

What do you mean by a colonial system? edited to add: I ask the question because I genuinely don't understand what you mean by it in this context. It seems to me that it might mean some sort of system that the British introduced in India that was then adopted by the Indians after Independence. But I could be missing the nuances in your argument.

From the OP: "the nation maintains (rather proudly IMO) the colonial structure of being a mere 'training ground' for Engineers and Scientists before they move to the US/UK/rem. Anglo-Saxon nations."

>How about looking into what else their education system does that is possibly absent in the Indian system?

No rote memorization for starters. I have found that if you want problem solvers, it's usually not people from rote memorization cultures. Hierarchical thinking is the next problem. If you want to disrupt something, you have to be a little bit of a rebel.

That's the thing about being a rebel in a hierarchical system. You really are up against much more than a "rebel" in say the U.S. would be up against. For example, think of the adoration that American people seem to have for people that do things off the beaten path. Being ordinary is to be avoided at all costs in the U.S.

In a place like India, you are taught to conform. A hierarchy is enforced. No deviation is tolerated. (Sorry to use such dramatic language. But there is no other way to describe this system.) You don't get to do anything outside of arbitrary norms that others have drawn for you. This is too much for young and curious minds that may want to do things even a slight bit differently. The path of least resistance is to just lie down and submit to rote learning or whatever other evil the system imposes on you.

> No rote memorization for starters. I have found that if you want problem solvers, it's usually not people from rote memorization cultures.

Rote memorization is the basis of all learning. It's actually the first step and it's at the heart of western education ( or it was until we decided to go to a silly route ).

You have to memorize the ABCs, the multiplication table, vocabulary, etc. And we used to teach kids latin and greek which required lots of memorization. Creativity and problem solving comes afterwards.

I'm against the anti-memorization movement in the US/West. It's great to memorize things and it's great to memorize things intelligently. Whether it be poems, songs, vocabulary, math theorems, code, etc.

As long as rote memorization isn't the end but the means to an end.

I see what you mean, you have to memorize the very basics. What I meant by route memorization learning culture is a bit different though.

I went to China once and during my visit I met a math teacher. He showed me some of the problems his students could solve.

I was impressed, it were very difficult problems for 11th graders. I couldn't solve some of them myself.

On one problem I asked him how to solve it and he handed me their math book. It was a chapter that had this problem solved in the beginning, and then about 100 questions which were just the same problem with different numbers.

I was hugely disappointed. The students didn't know how to solve a class of problems, just cherry picked problems that they learned by heart.

The problem here is not that you memorize some things, but in math you should understand the problem, and not just be able to input different numbers in an algorithm.

For vast memorization we have Google, for solving algorithms we have computers, for thinking how to solve something we need humans. And this class was trying to educate humans to be computers.

Even with that, India has done amazingly well in the space sector with the successes of PSLV in the 20th century and the recent Mars mission in the recent past.

That said, I have great respect for some of the Professors who move back to India; working at salaries lower than their RA stipends.

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