Real education

AS THE NEW academic session begins, the usual scramble for seats in schools and colleges would lead to nail-biting finishes at the percentage post. The closer a student is to the cent per cent point, the greater is the respect he or she will command. But has anybody ever paused to think that the reams of printed matter between the covers of voluminous texts that a boy or a girl crams to score hardly ever educate him or her in the absolute sense of the term? They rarely polish one's finer skills. They seldom mould one into a caring and sensitive human being. Parents walk through their days and nights blissfully oblivious of this fact. A writer of children's fiction once said fathers and mothers felt that the moment they put their sons or daughters in a good institution, their responsibility ended. It obviously does not. For, teachers - especially in schools, which are vital for a child's development - overworked (40-plus pupils to a class) and usually underpaid (a fact that perhaps keeps the best talent away from this profession) invariably find little time or energy or inclination to impart life's invaluable lessons, often found outside prescribed books.

Like, for instance, the importance of tolerance - of another point of view, which can be a different religion or a different food habit or a different dress sense. One wonders how many schools or colleges even thought of having a debate or discussion on the recent spate of violence against Christians. What about the caste killings in Bihar? What about poor old women being termed witches and battered to death? Mercy, kindness and forgiveness form part of democratisation of the human mind, and without this, political democracy will appear utterly meaningless. A spirit of give and take, which a youngster normally picks up on the sports ground, is missing today, and naturally. Where is the time to kick a ball? Where is the energy to see a shuttlecock move through the air?

It is time that schools and colleges (and parents) made a determined effort to spread real education. If the horribly negative implications of population explosion must be knocked into the head of every child, it must be taught the significance of plants and trees, and of the need to coexist with animals and birds. (Very few will agree what actor Salman Khan did was grossly wrong.) With an ever-increasing rate of death on the roads (the other night, a teenager drank and drove like a maniac in a swanky new car his father had given him; a few kilometres later, death overtook him and, pray, whose fault was it?) and with a scourge like AIDS threatening to wipe out mankind (there are 3.7 million Indians suffering from HIV/AIDS, according to the latest U.N. report), the young are shockingly ill-informed about these. How many schools deem it fit to provide information about safe sex? How many of them even think about road safety? One would be surprised to know how ignorant teenage two-wheeler riders are of street rules? Our temples of learning - one would still like to use this phrase - must try and look beyond Akbar's exploits or Wordsworth's wanderings. They have a place all right in the intellectual training of a student. But that can be merely one part of education. The other part must seek to enlighten an impressionable mind on the enduring values of life, without which no child can really attain humanity. In times like these - when strife and hatred and prejudices are so common - parents and teachers are the only hope of a society desperately dreaming of a sunnier morrow.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Previous : Rumour as archaeology
Next     : The LTTE and devolution