Education’s current priorities! Education is not one word! It is a multi-layered concept. So,you can’t grasp the meaning and its reach in any easy way.
Education has now acquired a much more complex meaning and significance.
Education is a continuous process,its reach is enormous,it effects basic changes in societies and nations!
We live in a much changed world.There is large-scale migration of people,both educated and uneducated.
The best educated and the best motivated among the younger generation migrate!
Education is not one word! It is a multi-layered concept. So,you can’t grasp the meaning and its reach in any easy way.
Education has now acquired a much more complex meaning and significance.
There are other aspects as well.See the current generation’s changes.Now,girls’ education has altogether taken a new dimension.if there is one big change that characterises this generation,it is the girls’ education.
Just now, we read through a book on current world changes in this part of the world,namely in India,Pakistan,Afghanistan,Tibet and Nepal.Pankaj Mishra’s” “Temptations of the West” by a 35 year old new Indian journalist,new for the simple reason,he is one of the new generation himself and he brings a refreshing point of view for the changes that are taking place in these geographically nearer countries and regions of India.
After travelling through modern Afghanistan,after watching the rise and fall of Taliban and the rule of the current regime under American protection, Mishra says(Page357) how women in Afghanistan feel still exlcuded though they now are freer to go to schools and universities and take up jobs on their own. Afghanistan missed out the colonial legacy, the educated elite class that became the backbone of other colonial states like India and Egypt”
Afghan society suffered a great deal by denying education to girls. Something like 1,50,000 working women and 1,00,000 girls at school affected, says Mishra. So,education of girls acquires enormous priority in today’s world, in all societies.
So long the hold of religion and the wake of all these radical Islamist terrorism has its upper hand in politics and policy making,then,there is no hope for these societies.
So,modern education has its task cut out.
Education has to be modern and education has to be doing its task in all its undiluted form! More education, more professional education is better for the home country and the host countries.
In some African countries like Haiti,Samoa, Gambia and Somalia, more than half of the university-educated professionals left their countries for jobs in other countries. Why,about one-third of the practising doctors in UK,US, Canada and Australia are from India! So, backward countries don’t have enough doctors,while in USA there are 300 for one lakh population!
Education today faces multiple challenges! Countries in Middle East face distorted text books! So too in China and Japan where history is distorted.Even in India we have this problem.
In Europe we see the education issues for the migrant children, even in the USA there is problem. USA went to war in the name of spreading democracy and freedom in the world.But now it finds itself,it is not such a simple task! So, education,more education and still more education seems to be the message for all educators and policy makers and war planners as well!