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Education
As their attention lay elsewhere...
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Why should they go through the pain of learning the hard way when there is a small screen ready to teach them all about life which they find attractive and heroic? If they remain uneducated, how can they ever hope to come out of the rut of poverty?
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"WE ARE supposed to have entered the scientific age where knowledge is power. Yet, we are doing everything possible to prevent the younger generation from acquiring knowledge because, they are being smothered by the net of television serial and cinemas; and cinemas projected through the television", said K. Venkatasubramanian, Member, Planning Commission, while speaking at the annual day function of a school in Srirangam, recently. He came down heavily on the television medium that was sapping the very life force out of Indian students,
Having been involved in a study of education patterns in Bihar on behalf of the UNESCO, he was horrified to note that there was chaos in education and the children were unable to grasp what was being taught to them, as their attention lay elsewhere. On being asked, even the Adivasi children said blithely, that they were watching television and, were all the time thinking of the exploits being shown on the screen that they could not concentrate on the studies.
Who can blame the children? For them, the TV is the value-former. They are exposed to murders and various other violent situations and become insensitive to the finer nuances of culture life.
Why should they go through the pain of learning the hard way when there is a small screen ready to teach them all about life which they find attractive and heroic? If they remain uneducated, how can they ever hope to come out of the rut of poverty? Thus, in Bihar, he found that poverty alleviation measures were meaningless so long as the television medium ruled the minds of the people.
Writing on the manner in which television was emasculating the minds of teenagers in America, James H. Billington said: "Television corrodes involvement let alone commitment in the civic arena, fostering a passivity and spectatorism that destroys interest in issues and participation in their resolution. In this sense it threatens basic civic decencies and shared social goals among a pluralistic people."
This statement applies to India as well. Our Government and the various private TV channels are consciously preventing the younger generation from acquiring power by luring them away from studies through films. Almost all the shows on TV tend to be based on films and, film stars appear on the screen and advice the youth generation.
In fact, it is so bad now that we discuss only movies or the exploits of film personalities (in writing, visual media or politics) and there is no proper forum to discuss our great culture at a national level. People do not realise that it is these film stars who need to be advised on how to behave and how they should not be intent upon misguiding the youth to fill their own coffers.
The learned speaker who has spent all his life in the educational field said that the time had come to cry halt to this tendency. Parents and teachers should advice the younger generation to gather knowledge during this seedtime and not fritter away their time in watching shadows performing unreal histrionics on the small screen.
Children should be made to realise that knowledge is power; parents and teachers must offer the best facilities within their reach to keep the students at his desk and ensure the future. This is, indeed, the aim of education. Eric Hoffer, put it right in "Between the Devil and the Dragon": "The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together." For there is so much to learn today and what a variety of tools facilitate such learning!
Instead of becoming couch potatoes, passive absorbents of every variety of sex and violence, students should be encouraged to read books, especially classics.
They should be welcomed to master the English language for it is now well-known that 80 per cent of the information stored in the world's computers use English as the medium. There are now so many attractive packages for garnering knowledge like CD ROMs in chemistry, physics, biology and biotechnology.
Instead of making use of these advantages, we allow the younger generation to remain mesmerised by what the actors do and say. The future of Indian culture will become dark while our freedom itself will be at stake. But in a set-up where we cannot ban the television, nor exercise capable control over the content of the shows, it should be at least possible to make the educational programmes more attractive and crisp. And known educational science scholars and writers should be percolated to schools. The adolescent mind can be inspired easily as it was when Mahatma Gandhi appeared before them and placed an ideal before them — Swaraj.
Our speakers could inspire with the ideal of knowledge which is power in the 21st Century; and how this power alone can help us keep our hard-won freedom unscathed against violence and extremism.
PREMA NANDAKUMAR
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