Where is America's Vinod Bansal?

I've lived long enough and hard enough to know that out of every crisis comes change. Change can be a good thing, a very good thing.

However, when people across the world don't have enough money to take care of their families, it's a little hard to convince them that the current world's financial crisis is good for them. This is especially true here in America.

In thinking on people in crisis, I remembered a man named Vinod Kumar Bansal. Here was a man who faced a monumental personal crisis. He spit in the eye of possible personal failure to rise like a superhero phoenix from the ashes of despair.

He took charge of his crisis by seizing upon change. He changed his life and changed the lives of future generations. Call me crazy, but I want a bunch of Vinod Bansal's to rise up and come to the rescue of America.

Sometimes in life, you work hard for your dream and then life hands you a surprise in the form of a crisis that tests what you are really made of -- such was Vinod Bansal's life. He dreamed of being a chief engineer of the chemical plant where he worked. He'd worked hard for his successes at work and had been an excellent student.

Then, at the age of only twenty-five, one day he noticed that he started having trouble climbing some steps occasionally. He developed other vague, but haunting health problems. He tried to ignore them.

When he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, a hereditary muscle disease that has no cure -- his world turned upside down. His battle was and still is about the human will to survive against all odds. He could have just given up and given into this incurable disease -- instead he wisely followed the advice of on of his doctors:

"Turn to teaching others and forget about your disease."

From the moment he internalized that concept, he threw himself into action. For the next eight years, he continued to work at the factory as best he could eight hours a day, he spent another six hours a day in study to improve his own learning, and then started teaching young students out of his home in his spare time.

He developed an intensive study system that bombards students with test questions designed for success in the very competitive entrance exams of the IITs. Starting out with just eight students, he soon had to add four more stools around his dining room table. As his students became successful in passing their exams, his confidence grew. He went on to found Bansal Classes, Kota's first cram school (called coaching institutes or tutorials in India).

As his students got into prestigious IITs, word spread. Soon it wasn't just students in his hometown of Kota, India -- but now students showing up from other parts of the country, begging to be coached by him.

In India, where eighty-six percent of the population lives on only $2.00 per day in a population of 2.4 billion people -- spending $1500 to take these courses a year, is almost an inconceivable price for the families of these students to pay. Yet, they gladly do it.

What's remarkable about V. R. Bansal, is that Mr. Bansal (now age 58) is now worth more than $20 million dollars -- Yet, he still continues to teach five classes a day. This is an example of dedication from a man whose mobility has him in a wheel chair twelve hours a day. It would be difficult to find an educator in this country, who would make that kind of sacrifice. It's inspiring to know that a man who can barely life an ink pen -- tells people, despite his handicap that:

"This just means I have more time to think of challenging questions for students."

Men (and women) like this hero from India, are the kind who need to rise up from the ashes of our world of troubles and make a real difference. Too many are hurting. Too many are mired in their own self pity in their own set of woes -- to see the big picture -- out of crisis comes change -- we each determine the quality of that change. We have the keys to make things right, for ourselves and future generations. Do we have the courage?

Vinod Bansal's seventeen thousand students seem to have some things students and their parents across America are lacking -- a tremendous desire to succeed, drive, and motivation. Remember, we're talking about teen-aged students who leave their homes with nothing more than their suitcases and their dreams of getting into a top college.

Every year, more than forty thousand students just show up trying to get into the intensive programs, that are quite separate from a regular high school, to prepare themselves for college entrance exams (primarily for one of India's seven prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).

Those Indian Institutes of Technology are tougher to get into than even our American Harvard or Cambridge. Each year, a staggering three hundred thousand plu high school students take the entrance exam in April.

Only the top eight thousand and six hundred are accepted. Of them, one third will have come from a cram school, such as the ones developed by V.K. Bansal. Fifteen percent of those accepted come directly from his school. This is a fiercely competitive higher education exam prep market.

Mention the word cramming in conjunction with school in the United States, and you'll get an entirely different concept of the meaning of the word "cram." To most students here, it's that all too familiar waiting until the last minute all nighter study session when they've failed to do the course work. Not exactly a plan for academic success over the long haul. It's also not about a successful plan in the course of study, to place well in an important entrance exam situation.

Sadly, (in my opinion) we lowered the bar of academics a long time ago when our entrance tests mean very little and show very little. Most of the time, they end up being reserved for only the brightest and hardest working students who wish to get into big name universities. The vast majority of American high school students set their ambitions far below being the best and the brightest. Seems like they care too much about their social world than preparing for their future.

There are some who even refer to tutoring-for-profit centers, such as Sylvan Learning, Barron's, Kaplan, Huntington, and Peterson's as cram schools. In actuality, these should fall more in the category of high priced "remedial" schools to tutoring students who are falling behind or failing academically in their regular schools.