CHENNAI: This is the season when students would get ready seeking for their higher education or placement opportunities as a progression in their educational journey. The Indian educational system does not offer avenues for career exploration to students in schools and colleges while pursuing their education. Thus, they end up in colleges or careers without adequate self-reflection, awareness, or understanding of their true interests and competencies. In many colleges, students choose their disciplines by default, peer pressure, parental pressure, or by evaluating the scope for placements.
This leads to a lot of issues in their regular attendance, attritions, disciplinary issues, and mental wellness. How do we perceive this scenario? Should we blame the parents or school or students, or our education system itself? Are there ways to intervene through bottom-up measures instead of expecting the policy to be amended? This article seeks to address this concern by emphasising the importance of thoughtful and informed career decisions through exploring oneself, educating parents, changing perspectives on markbased academics, and nourishing the campus life.
Students and parents need to understand that career planning is not simply about choosing a course or profession; it kicks off with understanding oneself. Parents need to be mindful of their ward’s childhood experiences, interests, values, habits, and natural inclinations, as they provide valuable cues on pathways for their career and academic progressions.
Careful observation of one’s lived experiences can help identify their personal interests, core values, natural skill sets, ambitions, capacity for perseverance. A conscious process of self-discovery can significantly aid students to narrow down their career choices and explore domains that align with their personality and aspirations. As primary stewards who observe their children from close proximity, parents can track the progressions in their values, interests, and skill sets, and facilitate their children’s participation in co-curricular and extra-curricular activities in schools. Non-judgmental and neutral feedback offered as prompts to their children would simply unearth their hidden competencies, to explore their own selves. Teachers are secondary stewards to track the progression of students and complement with the observations of parents.
Several factors often prevent students from making authentic career decisions. In Indian context, the decisions on career or life are normally dictated by parents. It is well known that many parents derive satisfaction by unknowingly projecting their own unfulfilled ambitions through their children’s career choice. This leads to default career choices like becoming doctors or engineers, and end up placing wrong people in right places. On the other hand, students often choose careers and degree programmes by judging only the scope for the courses, but without checking whether their temperament and skills align with a given degree programme. Most of the career choices made by students and parents, which begin with choosing the degree programmes, end up in simply following popular streams without deeper thought. Peer influence, family expectations, and societal comparisons can also cloud their judgment.
This leads to attrition of students after the first year or hopping from one programme to the other. Sometimes, it leads to overload and disruptions of mental wellness of students. Both students and parents may not misunderstand a student’s real strengths and capabilities. In most of the cases, ignorance about available opportunities and lack of guidance for both students and parents leads to poor decisions. The question here is whether schools can offer awareness programmes and educate the parents in parallel, to make them the perfect stakeholders who use proper psychometric tools and learner analytics from their learning progressions, co-curricular, and extra-curricular progressions continually.
Parents-teachers’ meetings normally end up in capturing mere academic progressions. But they could be navigated towards profiling students from a comprehensive perspective, assuming that every student is intelligent in their own way. If schools could come forward to take up this suggestion instead of focusing on making students as mark-scoring machines as if the institution offers a customer service, the Indian education system itself will be transformed.
Schools in general confine their professional development to pedagogy and curriculum. However, if the capacity of the teachers is not built in advance to take up this mission through a continuous professional development (CPD), the whole exercise would go in vain.
Choosing a career is seldom an easy or one-time decision; it is often a lifelong process of exploration and refinement for both students and parents. While the process may be complex, it can become more meaningful and manageable through enabling sessions among students towards conscious and guided reflections of their lived experiences. They can be encouraged to make meaning out of it through journaling, exposure to varied experiences in schools and colleges for self-exploration of their personality, and guided and honest self-assessment. Together, these could lead to the goal of informed clarity if not instant certainty.
Do schools and colleges take up this as their integrated mission, instead of promoting their business through producing students with State ranks and building the institutions’ brand? Parents are progressively becoming aware of the need to guide their children amid their own professional pressure. And they are feeling helpless. Schools can take this cue from parents by listening to their perspectives and pains as part of the interaction with parents.
A common misconception among students and parents is that marks alone determine one’s career potential. This myth needs to be challenged. Conventional academic assessments mainly measure reading and writing abilities, in addition to performance under examination conditions. But in reality, human potential extends far beyond marks.
A student who does not excel in conventional academics could still possess strong practical or bench skills (tinkering), artistic talent, leadership qualities, emotional intelligence, team-building ability, political agility, project management skills. These abilities are equally valuable and often more relevant in real-world careers.
Are educational institutions offering value to this perception and making efforts to break this myth? Students are classified in schools based on their cognitive ability to clear exams for the purpose of teaching and learning. Though this initiative appears to have practical purposes, it leaves indelible marks on their personality for life due to partial judgement that value only cognitive abilities. Consequently, the idea that schools and colleges are just spaces for mere academic progression should be cast away in favour of the concept of school as a platform for self-discovery. This should be promoted among parents, school and college teachers, and students themselves.
At this juncture, parents might raise an important question that only marks decide the admission process in Indian context and hence they have to force the children towards marks. It is to be noted that if a student has real passion for a particular discipline and possesses the required aptitude, a clear navigation offered by the educational institutions would help them naturally progress towards their career choice – with higher marks. Even if they become doctors or engineers as per the aspirations of Indian parents, the children would find it difficult to succeed in life if forced to score marks beyond their threshold.
Educational institutions are increasingly becoming business communities for importing and exporting students with transcripts to facilitate their career and academic progressions. They are progressively transitioning to treat education as a commodity serving the parents as customers and their perspectives as a trend. At times, as visionary institutions, schools and colleges have to go against the popular trend, diffuse the false narratives, and educate the stakeholders in making decisions for their children even if it hurts their business model.