[JonnieCache]

>As stated above, most colleges in India do not allow you to pick subjects and customize your course. Thus, all you chose is a 'major' (the degree) and the rest (the subjects and curriculum) has been chosen for you by the college.

>Children here make the first choice of their courses to study in High School when they are 16. That's almost too young to decide what you want to be.

This is exactly the same as in britain. India inherited most of it's bureaucracy from britain.

[CrLf]

I think it is exactly the same in most/all of Europe. And let me say that I think that's a good thing, but I'll get to why.

Let me give Portugal as an example, as it is where I live...

By the start of the 10th grade we had two major choices for the next three years, either go to a "professional school" or to a "regular school". Neither blocks access to the university, but the regular school's curriculum is mostly tailored towards it, as the professional schools are more tailored to just finish 12th grade and go work somewhere.

By the end of the 12th grade you must choose what course you want to take at the university. I chose Computer Science/Computer Engineering (a 5-year course).

The first three years of a course like this is a pretty inflexible curriculum (maths, physics, programming, miscelaneous computer science stuff, electronics, some history). The next two years are more flexible, you can choose your courses, but within the computing subject.

Nothing stops you from learning stuff from whatever subjects you like on the side. But the (mostly) fixed path means that someone who graduates from a CS/CE course (or any other) really knows something about CS/CE (and not only the subjects he/she deemed interesting enough to enroll in).

This means you don't end up with computing people that never used a functional programming language (or don't even know what the hell that is), or don't know how regular expressions actually work in a formal setting. They may choose to forget about it, or never actually need it, but they will be better professionals because of it. $DEITY knows that I took a lot of uninteresting courses in college, but sometimes that knowledge comes in useful in weird ways.

Flexibility is just fine if you have the discipline, but it is a killer if you really don't know what the hell you want.

[metageek]

But was it that way in Britain before India became independent in 1947? I thought the British "slot everybody into a job" system was part of post-WWII socialism.

[markfenton]

Modern British universities have always required you to 'read' a particular subject. The major change after WWII was to make them available to more people by changing the funding model rather than the educational system they provided.

The move to vocational courses for things outside the obvious (such as medicine) is a more recent phenonemon, in part bought on by large numbers of people going to university as it is the 'done thing' rather than by a desire to be educated, and in part by a return to a funding system requiring the students to pay for the education and wanting something tangible at the end of it (a job).

[metageek]

OK, but there's a difference between requiring students to pick a subject in advance and picking it for them.