Way Beyond the Three Rs - Y.S. Rajan

It is claimed that in India, 70% of eligible children do not receive higher education (beyond class 10th). For sustained progress of the country and to improve the standard of living of the masses it is imperative to tackle this issue. The author thus sets out to achieve exactly this. As expected there is no single, short, brilliant idea to achieve such a lofty goal for spreading education. Hence the book is filled with pretty much any suggestion one can think of. As an example the author is keen on changing the recollection based reward system in our schools to a more creative way of educating children, something me and others around me have been hoping for a long time.

In my view most qualified people today in the government, industry or education would come up with the same solutions as suggested in this book. However the real hard part is how to get it done. Even in this writing I could not find any detailed and concrete plans that could be taken up as is and implemented over a period of a few years.

I like the author's idea for increasing autonomy in the education system - not just at the level of colleges but for individual teachers as well. At present autonomy is hard to find in the Indian education system drawing parallels with the permit Raj prior to liberation in the early 90s.

Overall, I liked the book - especially the way it discusses the social problems faced by people deprived of a satisfactory level of education, something I personally have taken for granted all this while.