The focus of education has shifted from nurturing a student to being business-oriented. There are various ways that this shift has occurred.
The Credentialism Trap
In the Credentialism Trap, degrees and certificates are given more priority over actual skills. This leads to producing a workforce with degrees and certificates but lacking the skills to solve complex real-world problems. This, in turn, makes students passive learners who focus on grades over acquiring skills. This traps individuals into pursuing expensive courses while employers favour individuals with credentials to minimise risk.
Employers use degrees as easy filters, sidelining candidates who lack them, which leads to inequality. This leads to limiting social mobility, ignoring alternative paths like work experience or self-learning.
Focusing on credentials creates a trap where those in power with credentials choose candidates similar to them to maintain the system.
Credentialism drives ''credential inflation '', in which the value of current qualifications falls, pushing people to do relevant degrees to stay competitive. This burdens individuals with debt and time while creating barriers for individuals from low-income households.
The Rise of Coaching Factories
Coaching factories are also known as coaching centres. They have exploded in India, which trains students for competitive exams like JEE, UPSC, NEET, etc. The amount of money spent on coaching factories is more than the money spent on school fees in an Indian household.
While coaching centres promise mobility, they lead to the students being stressed, burned out, facing inequalities, leading to unregulated operations, ignoring the rights of the students until incidents Bihar protests, force registrations. Critics connect the rise of coaching factories to
credentialism, where coaching factories prioritise exam-cracking techniques over deep learning, trapping middle-class families in a costly rat race.
Coaching centres create a double-layered barrier to education and opportunity. The high costs of coaching centres like Kota and relocation costs to hubs have turned coaching centres into big businesses that widen the educational divide by poor students not getting access due to their economic condition. This leads to poor students not having resources that help them crack competitive exams like JEE, UPSC, NEET, etc., despite school education being free.
Coaching centres favour urban and English medium students, which excludes marginalised groups, continuing the cycle of poverty and limited mobility. This in turn leads to heightened competition, stress, suicides and a culture that guarantees fake promises as centres exploit aspirations without building actual skills.
The Managerial Shift in School Leadership
The managerial shift in school leadership marks the shift from traditional instruction or visionary roles to business -oriented. Principals now have taken the role of corporate managers, where instead of focusing on nurturing students, they focus on marketability, profit numbers and enrollment numbers. The weak public schooling in India forces parents towards coaching factories, forcing school leaders to adopt enrollment targets and resource optimisation to be a part of the rat race. This reflects the global trends of privatisation of education and outcome-based funding.
Subjects like philosophy, social ethics, etc., tend to get sidelined over time since they don't have a higher market ROI.
The managerial shift upholds barriers by aligning schools with exam-cracking techniques where principals chase credentials for institutional prestige over prioritising skill building.
The outcome? Inequality is further entrenched in a business-first paradigm by a dehumanised system where teachers are assessed like salespeople, pupils as metrics, and holistic development bows to the tyranny of numbers.
These forces are connected. The coaching is an outcome of credentialism, which forces schools to become infrastructural, which makes education business-oriented, which in turn makes it lose its essence.
Legislative changes should be brought about that focus on skill-building and making education a place of learning.
The commercialisation of education is also at the very core of what being successful means. Learning is no longer seen as something that helps in intellectual growth, but instead produces economic benefits. Students are also sometimes forced by parents to take up careers with job security and good salary prospects. This shifts classrooms from a place of learning and critical thinking to a place of rote learning and career. The rise of technology with regard to education has increased the trend immensely. Paid subscriptions to education tech like Byju's, Vendantu, Career Launcher, etc., tend to portray education as something that can be purchased and the purchase of which will guarantee success. This, in turn, creates economic disparity as those with money can easily access these resources and thus get an advantage.
As a result of this, education becomes a place of inequality and something that only people with money can access. Access to quality education becomes attached to a person's economic condition, whether they can pay for courses, digital education, coaching, etc., which makes education lose its function as a tool of empowerment and instead, it becomes a mechanism of division and disparity that depends on one's privileges. Addressing this issue requires acts that prioritise equal opportunity to study not just at the school level but also on higher education level and cultivating skills in students that help them in the future instead of just exam-oriented performance measures.
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