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Let's say you are entering the kitchen to prepare the south Indian delicacy of rasam. Among other things, you need to primarily cook tomatoes and Pigeon pea (a hard to cook legume). The tomatoes cooks in about 3 minutes, while the pigeon pea (toor dal) takes 20 minutes.Does the cooking time mean tomatoes are any more special or tasty than toor dal? Does it mean toor dal is replacable from the dish? That would be ridiculous. Of course, different foods would take different times to cook.But, why do we do the same mistake in education? Like the tomato, some people do grasp things faster and do peak early in their life. Like the toor dal, some people do take longer time to digest and peak later in their life. However, we believe tomatoes - people who show smartness early in their life - are inherently more special than toor dal. We conduct a standard test at age 17, separate the tomatoes from the dal and we just throw out the dal. That results in a very poor quality rasam & a poor quality society.I. ProblemsPreparing for careers without validationI find it ridiculous that we spend 20 years learning without any validation of skills, just to end up in a career path that will change anyway in 5-7 years. The closest analogy I could come up with is the software development we did at Microsoft - where we would code for years and then take the product to the customer. This is the traditional waterfall approach that resulted out of the industrial revolution.We prepare for career paths with no idea of what it means. We strive hard to be a doctor only to start cutting open bodies 10 years later and realizing this might not be for us. But, by that time we are already invested too much. Same with engineering and every other path. We give no time for "dating" the career tracks and instead just blindly pick some career path with no validation of whether our skills would match.In the current system, there are two distinct stages:Learn (schools & colleges) and Do (offices)I'm proposing a lean education method based on the learnings from lean startup, just-in-time manufacturing and agile software development. This distinction should cease to exist with a spiral development. If all the industries are moving agile, why can't the education system?Mixing career with philosophical explorationThere was a time when universities were primarily the domain of academics and researchers who wanted to pursue the higher truths in life. Oxford, Taxila, Nalanda, Cambridge, Sorbonne were all in that mold.Since the second world war, we have made it into a career developing institution by opening up to the masses and selling them an over-priced dream. Universities are very poor at preparing students for a career and most students are understandably not interested in exploring the philosophy.It is time to decouple them. Let there be universities addressing 1% of students who are truly interested in exploration. Let them not distract or be distracted by the 99% who are trying to get ahead in life in a career path.Energy problemImagine a young fastbowler or footballer who comes to you at the age of 16. He is young, athletic and energetic. You take him into a school for 12 years and teach him all the techniques of fastbowling (or passing the ball in football). But, by the time he is learnt is all he is in his late 20s. He is already tired and has little energy to pursue further.This is the problem with our colleges. At a time when we are at the peak of our energy and dreaming, we are spending in sleep-inducing lecture rooms. By the time we come out of it, some of our energies are already sucked out. If you ask some academics on the need for universities and they will reflexively answer that universities are needed "to train the mind to think and ask questions". Now, my question is: are you really doing your job in training them to think and are you the most cost efficient if the problem is really training the mind to think.Delivery ProblemThe industrial revolution created conditions where a person could be trained in some specialization - say balancing a book and he would spend all his life balancing the book as a clerk. You learn it once, learn it deep and use all your life.The concept of lecture that was taken from the Christian method of delivering sermon became the primary method of delivering education and got quite popular since the time of the industrial revolution [although it started a little earlier around the time of Renaissance].Things are not the same any more. What we need is the agile model of education with constant validation and finetuning. We need the education system to recognize the strengths and adapt itself to the learning needs of the different kinds of students.Scalability ProblemIn the next 20 years, our work force would have about 60 crore people (1 crore = 10 million) and a big chunk of whom will be forced to depend on the knowledge/service based industries. Our top colleges educate and prepare only a few thousand students for such careers.How are we going to educate these many people in the traditional way of 1 teacher teaching 20 students? We neither have that many quality teachers nor can afford paying market wages to crores of high quality teachers who will work in all random corners of the country.If we don't educate these 60 crore people & prepare fore modern careers, many of whom moving out of agriculture, we have a huge threat of unemployment and risk of social unrest.II. Solutions1. Learn by DoingThe industrial revolution method of delivering lectures as the primary form of teaching has to go. The "sermon method" has run out of its usage. We still use it because it is the simplest & schools don't want to think a lot. We need to have a wide variety of teaching tools of which lecture is just one part.Students should be asked to "do" and there should be a validation loop. For instance, if the students are taught about basic mechanics in physics, we should take them to a mechanic shop for a day and in a controlled condition help them fix something real. Same with computer science or history or prose. Here are my detailed thoughts on this.Given a chance to design Indian Education system, How would you do that?Here is how a student's profile would look like with real jobs, real payments and real reviews of his/her work.​2. Let the teachers act as guidesWe should remove the teacher from the role of delivering lectures and information packets. It is a poor use of the time of teachers. Most of our teachers are not really good at explaining things anyway.What if our classrooms use a combination of Quora and other tools where best teachers in the world explain and deliver the "information packet" and the classroom teacher then guides the students towards thinking & exploration.There are already experiments on this that are going now. These could be the norm. If the class is 40 minutes long, the teacher plays a 20 minute video or a Quora answer or some other medium where a world class teacher explains the concept. In the rest of the time, the local teacher guides the students making them ask the right questions, clarifying their questions and engaging in discussions.In short, the teachers are not there to deliver content. They are there to help the students explore.3. Let the education be adaptiveIn our education system, one rule fits all. Smart students often feel bored and not so smart get left out. Part of the day should be spent on an adaptive track. This could be delivered through software. The students spend 1-2 hours a day initially on the software that increases the level of difficulty if the student is smart and vice versa. Since it is done at the software level, other students don't even know if you are getting the easy ones are the tougher ones. In short, we can deliver different difficulty of content without creating a lot of inequality in the class.​4. Start career tracks quite earlyThe way in which we develop software and other products have changed substantially in the past. So should the way we work. We cannot afford to spend a quarter of life learning what will be doing. Instead, we have to rethink and adapt to a world where we learn throughout life.We should have a very short initial burst (say primary education) where we put all our efforts on training the minds to think. Instead of boring them with too much of knowledge, the goal should be just 1 - train them to think.Then have the stage 2 (may after about 12 years of age) where they spend 2-3 hours a day doing real work in the real world under the guidance of a mentor and spend rest of the day learning foundation knowledge & art of questioning.Then in stage 3 (about 17 years age) we switch most of them to an adaptive career track where they spend most of their day doing real work and 20% of the time learning. This continues for life.5. Adaptive career pathsWe should be spending time with a lot of different career tracks in an adaptive way. For instance, if we have a hunch that we might like software, the system would give a 5-day training on basic HTML and ask you to do real work at the end of it. You are say asked to design a simple one-page website for some company with a mentor guiding you. You design it and then find it either too hard or too boring. Give it a shot for 3-4 more weeks with the system giving you different types of real world projects and training.At the end of the month, if you are not progressing ahead in the career path, switch. Maybe medicine. The system will give you basic training and might first ask you to observe someone giving injection at a hospital. Then you try it as it is quite less risky. Then do slight more hospital chores that are trivial, but still getting you to observe doctors. After a month of doing menial tasks at the hospital [with a bunch of training] and following doctors, you can decide if that is the career for you. If yes, the system could make you work hard. If not switch. You can keep switching dozens of times by the time you are 20.My sample education path:Stage 1: (3-8 years old) Basic skills - reading, writing, arithmetic, listening exploration. My article in TIME on the basic skills. These Skills Will Help You Excel in the WorkplaceOutcome is someone who can write well, listen well and read a manual to follow instructions.Stage 2: (8-12 years old) Questioning skills - Social sciences, science and poetry. Teach them only enough for them to ask questions. Don't dump a big load of science or math equations.Outcome is someone who is hungry for knowledge and a passion for questioning.Stage 3: (12-18 years old) Adaptive learning & knowledge foundation - Give them more knowledge at this point through the world class lectures & also enable a lot of discussions. Rest half of the day would go in doing a real world project under a mentor. Experiment with different types of project.Stage 4: (18 - end of life) Adaptive learning in a career trackYou are an adult now. It is time for you to seek much more of your learning. Spend 80% of the time doing and 20% of the time learning and do this throughout your career.For the 1% who are truly passionate about philosophy, research and academic fields, there will be universities built on a older model [before 20th century] with more true emphasis on scholariness.See all the Dreams here: India Dreams Collection by Balaji Viswanathan

This is only a proposal. Remember this debate has always raged and has been discussed passionately whenever question arose about the recruitment of IAS officers.Disclaimer: I was selected at the age of 24 still based on my understanding of constitution, fundamental principles of a democracy and my own personal experiences I hold contrarion views. Not simply for holding a contrary view but for advocating what I feel is right, just, equitable and last reason yet most important one that of the public welfare and good governance.Do not be perturbed by news items like these. They only create confusion and demoralise the aspirants. Do not loose heart it is only a straw or a sand particle in the wind which you have trapped in your eyes. Concentrate on your well directed actions without the anxieties of success or failures. As Gita saysतस्मादपरिहार्येऽर्थे न त्वं शोचितुमर्हसि।।2.27।। you should not worry over the affairs or matters which you cannot control.This issue has always been polemical. Such changes are too radical and I don't think the age limit will be reduced to 26. It may be reduced to 28 but in steps to protect the senior aspirants. Reducing the age without advanced warning is patently unjust to senior aspirants who have been preparing with all sincerity. On the other hand if we do not reduce the age younger candidates do not suffer any injustice as they still have the opportunity to appear. In my view based on direct observations of public service for last 27 years : age and experience in other fields including years spent in preparing for exams have their own distinct advantages.This age restriction also violates Article 16 {Equality of opportunity in matters of public employment}[edit]There shall be equality of opportunity for all citizens in matters relating to employment or appointment to any office under the State.It is true that the constitution does not expressly prohibit discrimination on the basis of age unlike the provision of clause 2 : No citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, descent, place of birth, residence or any of them, be ineligible for, or discriminated against in respect of, any employment or office under the State. Still I feel age limit violates article 16(1) of the constitution. As there is no justification for an age limit in the civil services unlike a military service.It is only Article 16 sub articles 2,3,4 and 5 which permit the violations or exceptions to the fundamental intent of this article that isThere shall be equality of opportunity for all citizens in matters relating to employment or appointment to any office under the State.In fact there has to be a definite provision to allow for age limit as an exception to article 16(1) otherwise this violates the fundamental right of every citizen to hold any public office .Although I was one of the younger IAS recruits who had competed while doing job and with no coaching but given a chance again I would like to be an older entrant to IAS with coaching. I feel becoming a DM at the age of 20s is rather too early to do full justice to that job.I know several brilliant officers who were recruited at advanced age. One of them was almost 40. Yet they do excellent job . It is true that they could not become chief secretary or cabinet secretary however they are so professional that they are employed post retirement.What is important for the public service? the quality or the relative youth of the office holder? Functionally and for all concerned it is far better to have a 45 year old efficient and wise DM who is able to do a better job than a 25 year old who is misled into blunders by vested interests due to his inexperience. Do not forget that selfish persons are always on a look out to serve their ends even by misguiding or misrepresenting.Direct recruitment v/s lateral inductionIn my view there is also a conflict between the various recommendations given by ARC itself . On one hand they want to reduce the age for direct recruitment and on the other hand they want lateral induction. Lateral recruitment means hiring a person at any age and unlike UPSC exam is an entirely subjective process. Remember that MMS and Montek Singh Ahluwalia are some of the results of this lateral induction.How can we reconcile a subjective lateral induction without any age limit and a progressively reducing age for merit based direct recruitment. If we can have lateral hiring then we should allow recruitment to IAS at any age. After all it is based on a stringent process and is as objective as is possible. All the developed countries allow citizens to appear for their civil services exams at any age. After all how can we deny equality of opportunities.Let us examine the practice in other established democracies. In the developed countries a large number of the candidates to higher civil services are former clerks or supervisors who continued to appear for the exams and succeeded one day. Age limit is a conflict between the vestigial colonial mindset and the requirements of an inclusive open democracy and self rule. Is it fair to prevent the assistants, section officers, SDMs from becoming DM?I will give you a small sample of the reasoning given by the British to convey an idea of this colonial attitude which still persists in some circles-->They need Aspirants of Young Blood category specially Unmarried ... because they are Energetic and not defused in their Personal life...Why : In the british scheme of things they wanted the SDMs and DMs to be very young and unmarried. They did not want a repeat of 1857 when some women and children were massacred by a few angry rebels. For this reason they started recruiting at the age of 19 and would bring the young officer to bigger cities and cantonments by the age of 30. In fact for the children they would prefer to leave them in UK as early as possible.In my view IAS aspirants are the youth of India who carry the burning desire to serve India. In the words of PM Modi if we cannot die for our mother land like the freedom fighters we can at least live for the service of our Mother India. IAS aspirants represent those who wish to dedicate their lives to the service of our nation and I feel they have all the right to be the ones living for this cause irrespective of their age. Is it fair to block access to high public offices on the grounds of age?To one of my comments Priyanka Peeramsetty has repliedTrue that Sir. Experience always counts. But an efficient training can out beat that, just in case.My answer: Yes if the IAS training had been like MBA which applies to a uniform, standardised, certain, predictable corporate environment. IAS handles messy , uncertain, unknown, unpredicatable and unique situations. Moreover IAS training unlike MBA does not train us for the future jobs. It is still caught up in the 19th century inspite of cosmetic changes. Perhaps IAS training renders the young officers dysfunctional because unlike the senior recruits the young recruit may not understand the divergence between the stated agenda and hidden ones.We need to understand the historical background of this debate. IAS is successor service of ICS. Indian Civil Service which was a service set up by the British to rule India. In a country comprising India, Pakistan and Bangladesh there were less than 1000 ICS officers. IAS has around 4000 officers. British desired restricting it to Britishers.In fact until 1833 charter Indians were debarred from this service. Even after 1833 attempts were made to exclude Indians by all possible means. Age for ICS was lowered progressively to 19 years and the exams were held in England. Rules would be changed to ensure that Indians do not get into this service. For example, in 1863, exceptionally high marks in Arabic and Sanskrit enabled Satyendra Nath Tagore to become the first Indian to pass the entrance examination, the authorities in England were more than a little concerned. They reduced the marks allocated to these subjects and also cancelled a scholarship scheme which had been designed to enable nine Indian students to travel to England each year for higher education.The rare Indians who entered ICS were sidelined and frequently dismissed Surendranath Bancrica passed the civil service examination in 1869 but was dismissed in 1874.It was only after 1st world war, when British graduates became increasingly unwilling to come to India, that the ICS was opened up for Indians but the earlier prejudices persisted and continued to affect the recruitment system. We must remember that by 1910 UK had all the modern amenities of life, that we struggle for even today , electricity, running water, telephone, transport, public infrastructure along with a highly developed social and cultural life. British graduates were more and more reluctant to leave their night life, bars, pubs, restaurants, opera houses, races, parties. The previously blighted land known as Blighty ( belait in Hindi) was a shining gay land of fun and frolic.Thanks for A2A Alok Pandey , User-12050030402175129728 , Juhi Singh, Rukmini Banerjee, anonymous and others . These are my views I can only guess but the age limit will not be reduced to 26.

Gene Cernan was the last man on the moon. Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11, was the first to step onto the surface on July 21, 1969. NASA has never claimed otherwise. Buzz Aldrin came down that ladder after him. All the photos from that mission are of Buzz taken by Neil. There is one very cool one of Neil's reflection in Buzz's face shield. They did one EVA and then took off. Their main goal, besides landing, was to make sure that the Lunar Module (LM) decent stage and ascent stages worked to and from the lunar surface. Mike Collins remained in orbit in the command/service module (CSM).Before Apollo 11 landed, Apollo 8 and 10 both orbited the moon repeatedly. 8 (Dec. '68: Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell) tested the Saturn V rocket and the capacity of the Service Module engines to reach the moon and is the origin of the famous "Big Blue Marble" photo of the earth. It was sent to the moon so that the US would get there before the Soviets and did not carry a LM because the LM wasn't ready in time. This added to the danger because NASA always had plans to use the LM as a lifeboat in case of emergency with the CSM. Apollo 10 (May, '69: Tom Stafford, John Young and Gene Cernan) tested capacity of the command and service modules plus the LM to make the trip to the moon plus the separation and docking of the LM and the LM's engines in lunar orbit. Both orbiting missions took extensive photos of the lunar surface for the selection of potential landing sites.Apollo 7 & 9 took place in Earth orbit. 7 (Oct. 11, '67: Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham) was the first manned test of the command module with the Saturn 1B rocket and 9 (May. '69: Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott and Rusty Schweickart) performed the first tests of the LM and the Portable Life Support System back pack outside of the LM for EVAs.The second mission to land on the moon was Apollo 12 (Nov. '69) with Pete Conrad and Al Bean. They had two EVAs and reportedly, the most fun of any of the crews on any of the missions. Between EVAs they had a rest period where they were supposed to sleep in the LM but they were both too keyed up to get much sleep. They'd made a precision landing near the Surveyor 3 unmanned lunar probe which had landed on the moon in April 1967 and were able to take a camera from the Surveyor and bring it back to Earth for testing. Both had cameras, including a Westinghouse camera that was for sending color TV, live from the moon. Al accidentally pointed it at the sun and rendered it inoperable, but they had black and white cameras and each had a still camera (my dad, a Westinghouse employee, is still mad about this). In photos, it is difficult to tell Pete from Al so in all subsequent missions, the commander wears a red arm stripe and a red helmet stripe. Dick Gordon remained aboard the CSM. Al Bean is now an artist and makes paintings of the moon, including one that shows all 3 on the moon because that is what he would have loved to do. He always mixes a tiny bit of moon dust from his personal patches into the paint.The third mission to the moon, Apollo 13, (Apr. '70: Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise) was aborted when a liquid oxygen tank on the Service Module exploded two days into the mission on the way to the moon. They had to use the LM as a lifeboat on the way around the moon since they needed to slingshot around the moon to gain enough velocity to get back to Earth without their Service Module engine. They had to use the LM's decent engines to make their course correction burns in spite of the fact that the engines were never designed to be turned on and off. So Jim Lovell went to the moon twice without ever landing on it.Apollo 14 took over 13's mission to Fra Mauro in Feb. 1971 commanded by the first US astronaut in space, Al Sheppard accompanied by Edgar Mitchell. They had a wheeled cart to pull along with them to carry lunar rock samples. They had two longer EVAs and Al Sheppard put the head of a golf club onto one of the collection arms and hit two golf balls on the moon. Stuart Roosa was the CSM pilot and made an EVA on the way back. This was in response to Apollo 12 being hit by lightening on take off and not being able to assess the state of their pyros for launching their parachutes without visual inspection. At this point, the Nixon administration began to propose cancelling missions due to costs and flagging public interest. Apollo 20's equipment was diverted to Skylab, eliminating that mission and 18 and 19 were cancelled.Apollo 15 (Jul. '71: Dave Scott & Jim Irwin landing, Al Worden on the CSM) landed near Hadley Rille and saw the first use of the lunar rover. They collected the "Genesis Rock," one of the most famous lunar samples indicating some of the oldest pieces of the lunar surface. They also performed the famous Galileo experiment, dropping a feather and a rock hammer at the same time in front of a TV camera. They hit the ground at the same time, confirming the theory that, in the absence of air resistance, all objects in a gravity field fall at the same rate. Jim Irwin, one of the first of the Apollo astronauts to die of natural causes, had a "cardiac event" after taking off from the moon after days of little sleep and hours of EVA. The flight surgeon said that, on Earth, they'd have him in intensive care. They decided that, for all intents and purposes, he was in intensive care. He was in a 100% oxygen environment, being monitored constantly and the zero gravity would be easier on his heart than conditions on Earth. He made it back without further incident but died of a heart attack in 1991.Apollo 16 (Apr. '72) landed in the Descartes Highlands. John Young commanded with Charlie Duke. Ken Mattingly, who had been originally assigned to Apollo 13 but was bumped in favor of Jack Swigert when Charlie Duke of the back-up crew was exposed to measles, piloted the CSM. They drove longer and farther than anyone else had and found a rock the size of a building, called the "House Rock."The final mission, Apollo 17 (Dec. '72) was commanded by Apollo 10 veteran Gene Cernan, who was accompanied by Harrison "Jack"Schmitt and Ron Evans in the CSM. All previous astronauts were first military test pilots. Jack Schmitt trained as a geologist and was in the first group of scientists recruited as astronauts. He took the lead on training earlier crews in geology and his expertise and support gave them the knowledge and understanding to make the lunar samples significant instead of just random rocks. He was a scientist who trained to be a pilot who trained pilots to be scientific observers. He spotted colored rocks on the moon that they thought were possibly volcanic in origin.24 men orbited the moon, 5 made two missions. 12 men walked on the moon and there are hundreds of hours of video footage, not to mention radio recordings. The Soviets and Chinese watched them do it and never doubted for a minute that they were there. The Soviets even sent a probe which impacted on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. If people are genuinely skeptical, not just contrarian or paranoid, do the research. The data is there. Personally, I blame the Nixon administration for destroying faith the the US government. Given that the computers that took NASA astronauts to the moon had less capacity than many programmable calculators, let alone cell phones of today, NASA had the ballistic capability to get to the moon, but not the computer memory or storage to fake the images on live TV for hours and hours.Watching all this on TV as a little kid was magic. My dad worked for the company that made the color TV cameras. My grandfather worked as a contractor for NASA and brought us back stickers from the mission on which he worked. Being little kids, we stuck them on the inside of our dresser drawers. I so wish I'd have know to keep them. I was nearly seven when the last landing took place. I couldn't understand why they would just stop. I thought it would go on from then on.