Our own little world

I had a flash of clarity yesterday about how people from elite engineering schools and B Schools live in their own little world; cocooned from stark reality.

We have been recruiting at B Schools and Engineering colleges in the last few days, and I have been griping about the unsuitability of these candidates; moaning about how they cannot speak well and complaining about how engineers do not seem to know the basics of engineering.

And then yesterday, I met a classmate who has been doing some really good work in primary education, and is now thinking of expanding outside metros and tier 1 cities into smaller towns. He had just returned from visiting a few schools in small towns and was telling us about the appalling conditions there. Schools had English teachers who could not speak English and Maths teachers who did not really understand the Maths. They had learned how to solve the problems in the text book by rote and that is all they taught.

I can now imagine how the more ambitious kids in such schools work very hard and put a lot of genuine effort into what they think is expected of them - learning by rote. They do well in the state board exams and then make it to elite engineering colleges. Of course, they haven't really learned any Maths or Physics. A few years later, they end up on an interview panel with someone like me only to be written off as incompetent.

Here we are blaming the kids when we should be doing something about those incompetent teachers.