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| Sunday, 11 September 2005 |
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Different Outlook
Education is a never ending process by Arefa Tehsin "I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant and kindness from the unkind; yet strangely, I am ungrateful to these teachers." - Khalil Gibran Literacy, education, schools, higher studies, universities - these are not just the indicators of social indexes but also of human evolution. Other than speech, we have developed two more forms of communication - reading and writing - that place us on an elevated level than the rest of the animal kingdom. We in the cities measure our chances against survival in this world by the levels of our education, or may I say literacy. The better literate a person is, more his chances of leading a materially good life. Illiteracy on the other hand may result in poverty and exploitation. India, the biggest democracy of the world, is prosperous in age-old as well as contemporary and modern educational institutions. The archives and history books reveal the unrelenting facts about the classic educational heritage of the Indian subcontinent. Be it genetics, business management, bio-informatics, information technology, literature, languages, oceanography, agriculture, music, economics, mass media, engineering, medical science, space technology, archaeology and so on - you name it and it would have its presence in Indian Education, amongst the best educational institutions in the world. Believe it or not, according to various surveys and researches it is more difficult to get admitted to the topmost business management institutes of India, like the Indian Institute of Management than to get through the finest business schools of the west like Harvard. Yet, this system of education is full of dichotomies and flaws and is not as rosy as it seems. Only about 65% of the Indian population is literate. Literate in the sense that at least they know how to sign their names. The scene of primary education is sad. The literacy campaign in India is focused not on educating or generating awareness in a person but on teaching him how to sign his name. That defines literacy. Talking of higher education - there is no denying that all opportunities are there to be availed for undertaking degrees - graduation, post graduation etc. But mostly these degrees don't instil any value in the students and they tend to waste away those three years. Empty classrooms, uninterested teachers, lack of updated information and research, paint a rough Indian graduation portrait. The system churns out millions of graduates who have crammed, written and forgotten what they learnt in the three prime years of their lives. Post graduation and research is no brighter a picture. Researches are copied and recopied. The system from nascent to the final studies does not emphasise the overall development of the students. The stringent inflexible system only moves a muscle when some good marks are fed in. Marks decide what stream a student would choose and would not be able to change unless he decides to re-do from the start. Arts and Commerce do not extract the same respect as science. Science in turn is also pretty narrowed down with the main focus being on engineering and medicine. In contrast to this, Sri Lanka enjoys an estimated 92% rate of literacy but stumbles when it comes to higher educational institutions. The youth here would usually be an A Level or O Level pass-out but graduation is highly valued. In India, getting even a job of a clerk after graduation does not really come easy until you've rubbed your soles hard! India had once, and not long ago, an indigenous system of education, which was replaced by a completely alien system of education lifted and placed as it is from a foreign land. The British wanted to produce clerks who knew English and were fluent in the required spheres. Later on the British education system was installed in India without any alteration. People like Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi were against such insensitivity to a nation and its cultural nuances. Their concerns nevertheless went unheeded. The society has now become job centric instead of skill centric wherein each one had a role to play and contributed in their own different ways. Now, generally speaking, at least everyone's aim is the same - a well earning job. "There are two types of education. One teaches us how to make a living and the other how to live." Today, education has replaced learning. What matters is how much you score and not how much you understand. The quest for the unknown has not vanished; only now it is driven by the quest for money. Children are brought up with the expectation that they would one day be big achievers - big not in the terms of greatness but richness. It no longer matters much what a youth is interested in but in what would give him more returns. We have forgotten that "education is not a product: marks, diploma, job, money in that order; it is a process, a never ending one." The whole concept of education therefore needs a change once again, but, this time for the better. |
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