It has been an unusually stressful and busy academic year for schools and colleges. With the Kerala floods last year, and the commendable involvement of Schools and colleges in related relief and restoration activities, now most of them are running a hectic schedule in order to wind up the academic year on time. With the approaching Lok Sabha elections that demands the conversion of some schools and colleges into polling booths, there is an added pressure for many institutions.

With the paucity of time, almost all Saturdays are working days now. Pending cultural programmes and seminars that need to utilise funds in the current academic year itself are planned on short notice and organised back to back. Study tours naturally are turning in to a namesake affairs.

The only thing that gets compromised amid this rush is the holding of detailed discussions on the syllabus. It looks very natural to forego the quality of academic lectures amidst this struggle for calling it an academic year.

This issue reveals the rigidity of our educational systems. It is a sad fact that the typical Kerala academic culture seems to give more weightage to the number of examinations conducted in an year and namesake assignments written by students (which are merely manuscripts that compile the works of a minimum number of authors, mostly copied down without even the efforts to understand its essence) to meet the deadlines rather than as products of fruitful academic discussions that can otherwise happen inside the classrooms.

We tend to ignore the fact that in this way are following on the footsteps of the colonial masters who were focused on creating an educated class that qualifies to occupy the third-class clerical posts in their administrative unit. Its high time we shifted the culture of education to something that has the potential to kick start an intellectual discourse from its present state that concentrates on producing machines to work according to the prevailing notions in the society.