Negative impacts of commercialisation of education

“No, I want my child to study. I want him to get what I did not get in my childhood. I will give him education even if I have to pay a huge amount of money to the educational institutions” These are some lines which are said by the parents of this modern era. Every parent tries their level best to provide quality education to his ward and to fulfill their dreams they spend a lumpsum amount of money so that their ward is able to study in the best educational institution. Schools, coaching centers, educational institutions, etc., are prospering day by day. It seems as if they will give rise to a new industry named educational industry. They charge lumsum amount of money to provide education and the parents blindly spend such amount to educate their ward. But the question is–

ARE THESE INSTITUTIONS PROVIDING EDUCATION OR THEY ARE DOING BUSINESS IN THE NAME OF EDUCATION??

Education was something that was always driven by devotion and thought. Helped by their own volition, teachers were successful potters moulding men and women into the embodiment of an intangible divine force, of rectitude. Sadly though, the twin foundations of money and lust have penetrated the department of education as well, subverting it, leading to the establishment of a commercial education system that manufactures solipsists but doesn’t nurture altruists. While it is true that education must evolve as time passes but commercialisation of education is the worst thing that could ever have happened. Depressingly, we are not averse to the idea of commercialisation. India has become a dirt-pool where ‘educational’ institutions proliferate like mushrooms. And there is none to cleanup!

Central to this issue is the changing equations of the role of the teacher. The most sacred and the most important job in the world is that of the teacher.A teacher, hidden in the shadow of the student, must guide him to move ahead and resurrect our broken society. From the time when education started its first phase of commercialisation, the responsibilities of the teacher too, have been compromised. As Turk points out:

Unlike a retail clerk, the teacher’s role is not to sell a product or please customers. It is to challenge students, to provoke new ways of thinking, to make students uneasy with what they have taken for granted. . . Today’s university students increasingly view education and the time they spend at university as a means to an economic end, a way of ensuring profitable employment. This is not to say that there should not be an economic benefit to their obtaining a degree. However, while the outcomes of a commodity-based exchange in the free market are easy to measure and quantify, the outcome of education, unless it is erroneously equated with the degree as an ‘embodied’ form of capital, is not easily quantifiable. The financial structures of universities increasingly encourage students to see themselves as consumers of a commodity that is education. As public funding for universities decreases, ‘user-pay’ increasingly replaces it. The growing trend to raise tuition fees is thus often justified by the rules of the marketplace that perpetuate and confirm the notion that education is a commodity that is bought and sold.

Education today is an object of business which has serious and negative effects on our society. The more one can pay, higher the education he can get.Every year, number of students going for higher professional education is increasing in India and therefore, good opportunity exists for all these colleges to make money by offering such courses. In many cases, situations even remain much worst and students feel cheated at the end of courses. The best example is given in a movie, P a t h s h a l l a in which some rules were set for the school’s profit. . We can easily give the example of flourishing MBA colleges across India where average annual fees is around 5-10 lakh rupees; however, the facilities provided by these colleges are much below average levels. Most of these colleges remain more interested in making good bucks than providing quality education to students.

Every year, number of students going for higher professional education is increasing in India and therefore, good opportunity exists for all these colleges to make money by offering such courses. Same condition do prevail in other professional colleges in India. For these people education has today only become an option to make money than providing quality education to students. There is strong need to change the basics of the education system, not its pattern, in order to revive education’s real importance.

Einstein once said, “Education is that what remains after one has forgotten what one has learnt in school.” If what he said is true, none of us of the present generation have ever had education!