I agree, I don't know what it is about India but they are cranking out geniuses left and right.
Oh boy, here we go again, equating academic performance or even technical expertise with ingenuity.
I'm a student in India and education here is a joke. It involves no reasoning. All you're required to and expected to do is regurgitate and classroom experience involves literally narration of obsolete notes which the students have to copy down (mind you, there's no interaction or discussion or even explanation) and even respect is a one way street, the professor/teacher is basically God! and the copied down notes have to be reproduced in the exams as they are. Whether you understand what you're writing in the answer sheets is nobody's concern. So, how come we excel and kick your butt? Well, like most of you here already figured out, we have no other option. Either we excel or we kill ourselves (check out the student suicide rates in India - I'm not allowed to post links yet..grrr) OR if we choose to live, then we get eternally ridiculed and work for peanuts...like Indian peanuts, not what peanuts amount to in the US.
There's tremendous amounts of either fear-based motivation or incentivization involved in scoring in exams. This leads to the carrot-and-stick kinda motivation for education. There's no space for intrinsic motivation to come to picture. And guess what happens? As extrinsic motivators always do, they narrow down your focus and allow you to excel in doing monotonous tasks easily, which is what Indian education constitutes all the time. But you just cannot incentivise seminal work or work that involves creativity. Here check this out on how motivation is found to work - Google for Daniel Pink's science of motivation ted talk. You will LOVE what you learn from that video!
It may seem like Indian students are internally driven. Some really are. But most of the time, it's all a result of brainwashing and narrowing down of priorities to the point where students are like zombies. They begin to lose their personality and become paranoid over scores in exams. And this is precisely what parents want because scores are the ultimate indicator of your worth in the Indian society. Read my article about how examinations work here - go to stopmanufacturingus dot com and look for an article titled examucation: The reality behind the "system".
My point here is that the results that you see Indian students come up with is a consequence of their tremendous amount of incentivised HARD WORK. HARD WORK! NOT SMART WORK! I would define smart work as something involving creativity and non-linear thinking. This just doesn't constitute what Indian students are required to do.
To get Indian students making more impact in the world of ideas and not just sticking with their stupid jobs at the IT sweat shops, they need to be given more chances for being driven by intrinsic motivators, be given more autonomy and be allowed to develop mastery over something of their choice. That's when you'll be seeing Indian products that will rule the world.
Why is it that Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and a gazillion other awesome enterprises are out of the US? Precisely because there isn't so much external pressure and extrinsic motivators to which an American youngster has to comply. This allows for creativity and non-linear thinking, which are the driving forces behind world-changing enterprises. Precisely why Americans turn out to be way more creative than Indians. Don't believe me? Just check out products of Indian television and compare them with American television. Indian TV is mostly stuff copied off American TV...stuff like Indian Idol, who wants to be a millionaire, smarter than a 5th grader etc. And the rest of the original Indian programming is so disgustingly unsophisticated that you'd rather want to join the suicide parade rather than be in a position where you have to watch it.
At the moment, all the hard work that Indian students do will get them is monotonous IT jobs where they do software debugging and testing tasks [Ever seen a Indian software product in the mainstream software market?] for American companies that are driven by the dreams of American kids. Indian kids sadly just aren't allowed to dream. They're grown in an atmosphere where they have to figuratively bend over and let others with dreams to saddle them and ride on them. Indian kids are merely performance machines, not drivers of performance machines. And unfortunately, this gets seen as something admirable everywhere.
Anyway, my point is - please don't call us geniuses! I rest my case.
PS - Owing to the poor educational philosophy in countries like India, I've started a website - stopmanufacturingus dot com Check it out and let me know what you think!
