Dear All,
As you know, we run extensive and exhaustive program for ESSAY every year, it is only natural that we provide the review of this year’s paper too.
Section – A
3)Destiny of a nation is shaped in its classrooms.
Review– This is an interesting essay and probably also the most attempted one. UPSC has asked question on education before and it asked this year too.
We have wrote about it many times and informed our students too – that All the wars that we know are fought in Universities first and then in battlegrounds after. For example- Hitler fought the world wars based upon a theory by a professor of geography.
Freidrich Ratzel, was an eminent geographer from Germany who gave a concept of “Lebensraum” – which essentially means the “state is an organic entity” and as any organic entity it has to evolve and it has to grow or else it will succumb to stagnation and will perish eventually. This concept was furthered by another geographer named Herbert Spencer who gave the concept of “ Social Darwinism“, which had significant influence on Hitler who wanted to expand German territory.
Similarly the fight of Adam Smith’s capitalism and Marx’s communism also started in universities only and propounded by professors, which dominated the “cold war” era.
In sum, universities are the corner stone of everything we do. And classrooms are indeed the fertile ground for innovation too. And that is why , education shapes not only an individual’s life but a nation’s life too.
This is aptly reflected when we embedded the concept of Scientific Temper in our constitution too. Classrooms shape individual’s ethos and in turn the individual’s contribution determines the nation’s destiny. Be it Bhaba or Kalam, without them , India could not have a been a major nuclear power.
It is in the classrooms that the ideas are shaped and the miseries of mankind are solved through innovation. Thus the push for Atal Tinkering Labs in schools.
You can also include examples such as Taxila University, rise of Chandra Gupta and Chanakya who shaped India in ancient times. You can also discuss how the educational background of Jawaharlal Nehru guided India through its turbulent times of partition and reflected in our policies.
Thus they say, you are what you read, what you observe and what you learn from your classrooms. The most genius ideas came from schools and universities.
You can also write about Gandhiji’s view on education and his idea of Nayi-Talim and Rabindranath Tagore’s view on education.
The relevance of the essay is that – A nation will lack moral power if we don’t teach value based education to our children in their schools. Corruption by educated individual is due to the fact that there is no value based education and Gandhiji’s ultimate aim of education was to create a man of character thus you have to give emphasis on this aspect of the essay as well. (Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil)
Also, the classroom is not only about the the students it is also about the teachers too, thus you can cite some great teachers, for example – Socrates taught Pluto, who taught Aristotle, who taught Alexander and who ultimately shaped the Greek nation’s destiny in his times. Thus we not only need good and quality education but also great teachers in it. Then discuss the dismal status of education and especially lack of quality teachers in India. Without a great teacher, there is a very rarely a great student.(Link it with the recent test where only 17% candidates have passed the Bihar Teacher Eligibility Test (BTET)Link-Click Here.
Teaching has become the last resort for individuals due to lack of proper incentive and thus the great talents are usually don’t enter the profession of teaching and this is hampering India and its destiny. You can’t build a great nation without great teachers and great universities. In fact, if you look at the biggest MNCS around the world today (HP, GOOGLE, MICROSOFT, FACEBOOK or any other), they have their origins in the schools/universities. America is at the top end of innovation and this is due to its great teachers, universities and students, who made America what it is today. What would be America without the Havards, Standfords or MITs ?
As always this review is indicative only and not exhaustive.
Hope is helps.
P.S- The Essay Test Series for 2018 is already launched and registration can be done here- Click Here
Thank You
UPSCTREE
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.