We are destroying the core education values
There is a need for a de-schooling movement today. To cut down the craze we see today, to get merged in the crowd, the migrate wherever there is money prospect. Do educators care for such core values? I don’t see anyone even bothering to ask questions. Neither they know the answers!
There was this debate recently in the UK about admissions to quality universities like Oxford. Just four years ago, Oxford refused admission to a what is called State school, the girl was “picked up” by Harvard and she had just now returned proudly back to UK. The debate is how good is British school education? It is too much academic curriculum – concentrated, the British people these days are very paranoid about their worth in the world. In education, they trace all their inadequacies. A more breeder and balanced curriculum in the peculiar Indian conditions would include more Indian and foreign languages, more travel and camping at heritage historic sites and environment protection activities, more rural-urban exchanges, more social services like imparting literacy to school dropouts and out of schools, slum children and adult literacy programmes. One more important change must be the school gap year. One year there must be a break so that the student engages in any one of the above activities and such activities must be given credit for admissions in all professional colleges.
In India? Are we paranoid? Paranoid about anything in education or in life? I do know for sure! What I know for sure is that we, as Indians, are surely paranoid about our insecurities. There is this Indian mindset, the feeling of left out of the opportunities of life, so there is this madness about getting more insecure, uncertain about our future. The future of our children’s opportunities in life. Certainly, Indians suffer from a terrible paranoia, there is mad rush to get into schools, paying by bribe without a split second about our values. Bribes in education is now becoming highly respectable and there is a bribe for everying in education. The CET, the medical and engineering admissions in Karnataka, TN and Maharashtra had reached unmanageable proportions.The UK girl whose admission Oxford refused and Harvard openly invited by paying her full fees, is a typical example of what is perceived to be the dividing line between the American liberal-arts education and Britain’s own “not so liberal-arts” education.
Admissions policy must be governed by the concept of “Fair Access”. More media interest, more NGO, volunteer groups from among the educators ranks must minimise the budern on the government. All wild dreams? Yes, the challenge of liberal education is to find out the space for creative minds to engage themselves in framing more meaningful education policies.
There is this undeniable core of human personality that is sought to be identified and cultivated by education. That is the human ingenuity, the skills, the skills enhancing environment and cultural milieu. These traditional, heritage based, why even family based skills that are all vital for the individuals concerned. More so for the society and culture concerned. These indestructible innate individual powers and skills are, in my opinion, the very core of education. This education, strictly is not amenable, or not easily amenable to any educational pedagogy at any particular historic context. These fall in the domain of culture, not strictly education as a training programme. What we witness today is over-schooling, over-regimentation, over mechanisation of the education process. That process had gone to wild levels, the individual students and parents have lost their innate power to live as freed individuals.That is a great pity, I would say personal tragedy for every school college going student.
This subject you can’t study from any textbook or learn through any government regulated education. All the government or universities or state boards do is to award you a degree or marks and that is all. You are part of data. You are not human beings or individuals. Education, I dare say, the true education is all about human beings, about individuals, the worth of persons and personalities.
These education value constitute the very soul of education philosophy or if you like education ideology.
Arts and crafts are part of learning process in whatever form you may provide them. So too the social interactions, the real life situations to which you expose the learning process.
Or when science and technology alone won’t have answers? Or, our education values must question as one writer puts it “the arrogance of the modern age of science and technology”. Make our schools curriculam more breed based, give up the pretensions of producing 100% passes Nurture and Produce geniuses individuals exceptional artists, poets, musicians, sports men and women, social activists, concerned citizens!