The Minister for Higher Education, Abdul Gani Malik, has recently stated that district employment and counseling centers in Jammu and Kashmir have registered roughly six lakh unemployed people up to the end of 2011. Of these, approximately 3,000 were illiterate and the rest were educated-unemployed youth. 

Through recent employment fairs, training programs and the like, the government is hoping to “provide job opportunities to youth,” according to Malik. But it makes you wonder, why do Kashmiri youth need “training” to improve their employability—if they have already received their degrees from educational institutions? Shouldn’t the education our children receive in colleges and universities equip them with the tools they need to be part of the workforce? 

We are part of a system that often views issues in a vacuum, and subsequently tries to come up with solutions that are also developed in similar vacuums. And then we are left wondering why the solution failed to deliver results, and why the problem lingers. Our education system is in dire need of a massive makeover, one which starts with taking a critical look at what exactly we teach in our institutes of higher education; how much of it needs to be at par with the times that we live in, and how much of it will directly benefit students once they earn their degrees and step into “the real world.” Without oversimplifying the issue, perhaps one way to address the unemployment problem in Kashmir is to address the education problem in Kashmir.

Go to any college or university in the state, and you will find more students—and teachers—concerned about the “attendance shortages” and the “grades” and “percentages” that a student attains in his or her course. That is unquestionably, almost always, the measure of success for a student during the course of their education, and when they receive their degree. Interestingly, however, universities of repute throughout the world often evaluate themselves based on how many students get a job once they have received a degree from that particular university; and not based on what percentage that student attained.

Shouldn’t the education we provide our children be an all-encompassing experience—one that gives students a balance between the theoretical and the practical, the collegiate and the professional? Parents spend their lives making money to send their children to a university, hoping that the skills their children acquire will prepare them to be able to make a decent living, and to make positive contributions to society. So instead of pumping money into employment training programs and the like, perhaps what we need is to critically assess the education system that is in place. What we need is to establish ways and means by which career counseling and employment training skills are imparted in our institutes of education, and not outside of them. After all, isn’t it what we owe to ourselves, and to the future generations of Kashmir?

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