Article - Choosing The Right Educators

Choosing The Right Educators

My career as a Consultant takes me to varieties of people and institutions that never fail to present me with a direct or an indirect lesson. Good, or bad, painful or happy, these lessons are guaranteed to influence my outlook towards the world. Recently, I had to engage sessions at an MBA College which made me rethink the parameters of education in our country.

 The institution harbored a school-like atmosphere and the student-oriented system of the recent day is yet to lay light in the campus.  Before the session, the Principal presented me with a quite de-appetizing picture of the students: from poor families, lacking quality education, have no special outlook towards life,  not serious in studies, pays no good attention to the teachers, talks in the class, co-mingling between girls and boys… There was a huge list of unnecessary faults which were all negligible concerning the modern day world.

He finally stated “Sir, the institution would have been so much better if we had high quality students here. It is so very easy to teach them. These students are not up to the mark and the teachers have a very tough time trying to tutor them.” This reminded me of one of my friends, a lady at Harvard, who once told me that the teachers there were afraid to go the classes, as the students were so brilliant that any topic would be dissected to the core and every possibility would be analyzed with such acumen that the teachers always felt inferior to them! I realized instantly that the Principal was definitely mistaken. The teacher who accompanied me had the same complaints to make and taking me to students she greeted them in the tone used by nursery teachers; “Good Mo…..rini….ng Stu….dents….”.  She was greeted back in a much matured way and she began introducing me to the batch in English pathetically inflected with a Malayali accent.

Further into the day it was clear to me that the students were definitely at least a ten times better than the teachers in language and demeanor.  Later I learned that the name of the founder of the college and its relatively less tuition fee was what effected in this degradation of the quality of the institution. Moreover, agents were employed to canvas students to opt the college. The thought was quite unsettling. New colleges sprout up in every nook and corner of the country but there are only very few of them that ensure quality education, why is it so?

It wasn’t very hard finding the answer. I just had to give it a little more thought and the entire mystery unraveled itself before me like an open book to read. These new institutions are set up mainly by industrialists looking for profit, because “education is the new business these days!” The thought is disturbing, but this is the truth. An enquiry into the inception of any of these colleges will exhibit the names of business persons as its founder. The main motive is to reap money and sell education and this result in a drastic degradation of the quality of education. The focus is mainly on the name of the Institutions, their appearance and the empty honors of the teachers.

There are of course exceptions. There are institutions struggling to ensure quality by training the students in a more than satisfactory way making them worthy to be competent in the highly sophisticated world. I cannot hold myself back at this point from mentioning the Chaathankulam Business School where I experienced true vigor from the institution to make something out of its students. By patiently investing in education they try to ensure the quality of education and inspire the students to challenge their own limits. They seem to know the tactics to mould out the students and ready them for the competitions of the modern business world. The institution does act as an example for its creed. But in a general consideration there is more number of profit-hungry (financial) groups of educators than sincere providers of high-quality education these days. And it has become very difficult to differentiate one from the other.

“If your plan is for a year, plant rice. If your plan is for a decade, plant trees. If your plan is for a lifetime, educate children.” – Confucius

But when you do want to educate your children it is very important that the right institution is chosen for the task. Here are a few suggestions from my side:-

1. Learn about the institution well.
2. Do not value any institution by the grandeur of their infrastructure.  The number of pillars and the colour of paint cannot tell you the educational quality.
3. Do not relate the tuition fee with the quality of education. They seldom come in a faithful union.
4. Believe in the human infrastructure- the quality and skills of the teacher is what really counts in the classroom.
5. Never blindly believe the placement details and list of associate companies. The data may be of a total evaluation over the years and may not be of recent associations or placements. Moreover, there are agencies that work on behalf of organizations and getting placed in one such agency or outsource cannot be accounted as a post in the root organization.
6. Extensive research is required on the authenticity of provided details from the institutions. It may sound difficult, but a few enquiries with the alumnus should bring about a more authentic data.

Always be cautious about the institution you choose, because carelessness in the present can give you massive heart throbs in the future and later regrets will never make things right.