An interesting thread from Doc Searls on to Robert Paterson's blogon the state of education systems, in response to this story. Roberts says in his post :

I am now convinced that our approach to school is one of the most powerful blocks to a better society. If we deconstruct what we really learn at school it gives us this picture.

1. You are an empty vessel and I am the expert. It is my job to fill you. - Result, we stop taking responsibility for our own learning. It is very hard to rediscover later in life that you can and should be your own teacher.

2. Everything you need to learn is in a book or in my words. Actually experience is the best teacher not abstraction. We now medicate 30% of the kids in school because they cannot sit still and hear their "mother's voice" drone on. Only 43% of places at university today are held by men! Most have been crushed and put off by a passive over-feminized system. So much for Girls being second class school citizens!

3. All knowledge comes in separate boxes. The bell rings and it is English. The bell rings and it is math. The real world is a connected system. More than anything this concept of separate subjects with no linking context is a tough meme to break.

4. Collaboration is bad. We are taught that you should share toys - bad idea - but not share work. Sharing work - the key to life and productive work - called cheating and is heavily punished.

5. We are so frightened of failure that we have taken all risk and challenge out of school. As a result we have taken out the value of achievement.

I think the same issues hold true in the Indian eduaction system today.  I was only just chatting with a friend about creativity and how "structured education" is demarking logic and intuition and in the process reducing our capacity to "sense".  Here are some things he said to me :

Ever wondered what creativity is? Had studied various left brain/right brain literature. On looking back, the one thing I’m uncomfortable about is, each of the study seems to centre from a basic precept that we can’t naturally, simultaneously, work our intuitive and logical faculties. That, to work intuitively/creatively we’ll have to, in some ways, unlearn and work at it to arrive upon the use of such faculties.

This I find is a primarily western/occidental position and not naturally an Indian (I wont go to include the whole of East) position. In the west, scientific reasoning had had to fight a long battle against the dogma imposed by the then institution of Church. It had to rely on 'logic' as derived by Aristotelian philosophy to challenge the tenets of Church. The triumph of "Science' was further established with the fruits borne by the Industrial Revolution. Thus, a school of thought process became a universal panacea. "Structured thinking"! In the same manner as in industrial product was producible and creatable by breaking down creation into a logical structure or process. This process obviously took time to allow within its ambit unstructured thinking.

The concept of education today is to break information into quantas and disseminate it in a structured manner. The success of education, until recently has been primarily information retention and secondarily subsequent application of the information and in its application this information became knowledge.