Education - basic or higher

I am really not sure how i should present this topic - where we should stress more - basic primary education or higher education. As government after government spend huge sum for primary education (although i don't know whether it really goes to the actual needy), let me tell you the bleak picture of our higher education. As i have come from a very backward district of West Bengal, i can at least try to give you the real picture.

i studied till 10th standard in a school which can boast of anything but good quality students. we had a strength of about 100 students at Xth standard appearing for the board examination. Out of those 100 students, just three got first class. And out of those three probably i am the only one who could break the wall of the small town to come into a life to compete with the global workforce. Now you may wonder what has happened to those unlucky 97 students who could not make it big. i can tell you very few of them have become financially independent in lives. please don't take it otherwise. i am trying to give you a statistics not to boast about myself, but the real picture of education in small towns.

so my point is all of the 100 students had got the basic education. most of them came from well-to-do families. then why is this failure in building a career out of their good basic education? hence providing basic education is not the solution, but to provide an education so that a student can earn a livelihood out of that education is the challenge.

i think we are stressing too much on just the enrollment of students at the primary schools. but it is important at the same time to see whether those students are able to earn a livelihood out of that education. making a student self sufficient so that he can earn a livelihood with his basic education should have been our motto instead of just getting the students enrolled at the primary schools. i can bet that in small towns and villages, even with education up to 10th standard in so called local schools, people end up in doing menial works.

now as we stress too much on primary education, should not we start thinking that people with good higher education can build a society where the students having basic education can be absorbed? there should be a balance between the stress given to primary education and higher education. its a different matter, although, that even with good higher education, people remain unemployable.