In many Indian cities today, there’s a growing trend among high school students in Grades 11 and 12: they enrol in so-called “dummy schools” and simultaneously join full-time coaching institutes like Aakash, Allen, or FIITJEE. While these coaching centres focus entirely on preparing students for competitive exams like IIT-JEE and NEET, the schools are often reduced to fulfilling formalities such as conducting practicals, attendance and board exam registration.
Why Has This Practice Become So Common?
1. Competitive Pressure: Cracking entrance exams like JEE and NEET is fiercely competitive. Parents and students believe that specialized coaching offers an essential edge.
2. Eroding Trust in Schools: Many regular schools / junior colleges fail to equip students with the academic depth and problem-solving skills needed for these tough exams. This leads to a lack of faith in the school system.
3. Curriculum Mismatch: Board syllabi (CBSE, state boards) often diverge from the format and depth of competitive exams. Coaching classes claim to bridge that gap.
4. Societal Expectations: There is immense societal and parental pressure to pursue careers in engineering and medicine, leading to an unhealthy obsession with cracking a single exam.
The Gaps in the Current System
1. Poor Conceptual Understanding: The current model emphasizes rote learning and exam tricks, undermining deep understanding and critical thinking.
2. Creativity and Innovation Take a Backseat: Students are so focused on tests that there’s little room for exploration, curiosity, or innovation.
3. Mental Health Crisis: The intense pressure cooker environment in coaching hubs leads to burnout, anxiety, and even depression or suicide.
4. Inequality in Access: High-quality coaching is expensive, creating an uneven playing field for students from less privileged backgrounds. Governments bridge this with caste / class based reservation, throwing meritocracy in the bin. This leads to poor quality of professionals in the society.
5. Marginalization of Schools: Schools become irrelevant, reduced to certificate-issuing bodies, and teachers lose their significance in a student’s academic journey.
6. Narrow Definition of Success: Success is equated with clearing one make-or-break exam, disregarding diverse talents and passions. This means that other than IITs or NITs and other few reputed schools, other colleges of professional engineering or medical education are worth trash. Employers do not value the students passing out of those institutions and they will not get a good (high-paying) job.
The Way Forward: Building a Learning and Innovation Culture
1. Reform School Education: Invest in upgrading curricula and training teachers to deliver deeper, practical based conceptual education within schools. Shut down the schools and colleges which students do not attend. Convert Coaching institutions to colleges, if that is where the quality lies. There should be “NO ROOM” for dummy colleges.
3. Rethink Entrance Exams: Design entrance tests that reward understanding and innovation. Create multiple entry pathways to higher education. Get the brightest minds in the country to elevate professional education institutions in the country.
4. Prioritize Student Well-being: Introduce counseling and mental health support in schools and coaching centers. Teach students to balance academic goals with emotional resilience.
5. Promote Career Awareness: Expose students to a variety of career paths beyond engineering and medicine, including research, entrepreneurship, design, social impact, and more.
6. Use Technology to Democratize Learning: Leverage digital platforms to provide high-quality content and mentorship across urban and rural India.
Shifting the Mindset
India does not need exam warriors, but curious minds, creative thinkers, Dreamer Doers, Changemakers. Only then can we realize the product and technology innovation that defines the future.
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