Education For The Sake Of Education

When I open any newspaper I get to see….the names of top rankers …the percentages , the scores, the ranks, names of big institutes and then the name of the coaching institutes…. Education seems like a big contest… the top rankers like the show stoppers of a fashion parade….. a student who misses the elite group feels like all his/her hard work was in vain if it could not help him /her make it to the elite list regardless of the percentages he has scored…. And there are parents and teachers who list out everything that they have done to reach this day….as if it was the Judgement day….the last day on earth and the first day before God… we see children being showed off as trophies or a very expensive accessory or a race horse of a very respectable breed.

We witness this every year, do we ever hear of these students afterwards…what became of them what courses did they actually pursue….did they serve education further. And while celebrating their feats we had forgotten those children who are differently skilled…but still managed to secure pass marks or even a first class… that moment was once in a lifetime for them also……. This can mean that we respect education before everything else…. We hold it superior…

But if that is so why do we see so many education factories…. The ones that guarantee that they can make the kid crack the entrances….and all that we see being done in these factories is children giving endless exams to practice the possible questions…. They do sample papers …the previous years’questions….. they solve and resolve the same questions 10 times over … they keep looking for question banks … the mantra the more number of questions one solves the maximum number of times the more his chances of cracking the exam…. and they are proved right …. cause similar questions are seen in exams… student solve it get it by heart …do whatever they can … with or without getting the essence or purpose or utility or relevance of the particular problem or question……

What is happening is … if we consider knowledge as a sugar cane … what is happening today is… the cane that has been already crushed is sweetened with artificial sugar…and given to the student as a task to extract the sugar… he does it … is appreciated … pushed up a rung… the same extracted by him is reused to sweeten the same used up cane … and given to the next student and so on…. It is like a dummy war…. it is like giving a kid a bicycle with two extra support tyres for balance and clapping when he rides it… as if he has actually mastered the balancing act….

We are witnesses to this ….. the essence or purpose of education is lost … it is only about who can reproduce what has already been repeated 100 times over in previous papers … nothing new is being achieved .. no new problems are being solved…. Education is an accessory you get the more expensive model if you can afford it… you can get the top ranks if you get the top coaching institutes and you should be really happy you are able to just clear the papers without the coaching if you are really good. Why even we have accepted it… don’t we see read in news papers….”so and so student with poor back ground could clear the papers at four thousand and some ranks .. and that’s some feat considering that he did not have expensive coaching classes…”. There we have said it.

I just hope we can slow down this mad race… bring back education to where it belongs … not a commodity .. not an attribute that can give you newspaper coverage…. not a show piece to show off in social circles.. …not a rehearsed farce… not chewed chewing gum …sweetened and chewed ..many times over ….