Going Forward!

The Indian education system adopts a top-down approach where major initiatives and strategies get rolled out at 35000 ft in university board rooms and council. However, the approach needs to be bottom up where the students and faculty at the last mile should be the focus

- Vibha Singh

What do business schools actually teach? This is a more complicated question than it first appears. Much writing on education has explored the ways in which a “hidden curriculum” supplies lessons to students without doing so explicitly. About 90 per cent of employment opportunities require vocational skills. Only 20 per cent of our graduates get employed. The rest are unable to get suitable employment due to the lack of employable skills.

In the present context of globalisation, the demand for skilled and multi skilled workers has increased. Therefore in the context of developing countries, such as India, there is a critical need for quality skill development and training. From the 1970s onwards, researchers explored how social class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and so on were being implicitly taught in the classroom. This might involve segregating students into separate classes – the girls doing domestic science and the boys doing metalwork, say – which, in turn, implies what is natural or appropriate for different groups of people. The hidden curriculum can be taught in other ways too, by the ways in which teaching and assessment are practised, or through what is or isn’t included in the curriculum.