Reparing education

Did we invent prayers to be recited and repeated regularly but never to be understood? Why does it happen all the time in India that we cannot resist the temptation to recite the prayer in Sanskrit even if no one, barring a few, understand it. We have come a long way since the times of the Sanskrit tradition when Sanskrit was the language in active public use, if such times existed. Our obsessive love for our ancient classical language blinds us from purpose every time we refuse to render prayers from Vedic, or other Sanskrit texts, translated into a language understood by the masses. The significance, however great, embodied in our prayers is unavailable for the audience when recited even a million times in a language that the audience doesn't understand. Consequentially when our behaviour contradicts what we ask for in our prayer, we seem like hypocrites. This is a sad reflection of the turn of things in our country since the time of the departure of our imperialists. We established governance, adopted a democratic model and did splendidly well for us to think we'd done a great job. But, the seeds we sowed haven't yielded as it could have, if our implementation of our intentions were less flawed. Consequentially, we have grown disproportionately over time. We have become wealthy, yet remain impoverished in our values leading to rampant corruption in every sphere of national existence. One wonders what went wrong in the middle after a good head start. Perhaps, it’s our approach towards education that has sunk us. While we paid close attention to educate our countrymen on science, math and other competitive subjects and fields, we completely ignored the purpose of education in adding to the character of the individual. We’ve only regarded education as a means to impart knowledge of few techniques to solve industrial problems that will enable one remain in contention for a job or other in the employment market. The chief purpose of education, that is to shape the overall personality of the learner, has largely been ignored as we mechanically condition ourselves to think and act in a particular way; forgetting the fact that we are capable of inventing ways; ways that are different and better than the existing ones. And when individuals trained on such inadequate systems of education become employed, they can be hardly expected to deliver anything beyond what they learned from the limiting education they received. Most of us have do not realize our fullest potentials, simply because we’ve been led to believe that our capacity to accomplish is only so much, because there is only so much to achieve. This limits our imagination and forces us to dwell on what has already been accomplished, which we gladly accept as reality. Consequently we become corrupt to gain wealth and power, when we realize that what we’ve learnt doesn’t capacitate us to tread beyond the ordinary. It is this tendency of our present education system to create ordinary minds that fuels our contemporary problems. So any movement for social change should begin at the level where if targeted the impact would be relatively permanent. And that is education; to be more specific, primary education. We have to make education more purposive than what it is today by including study of subjects that interests the student than what the parent feels the education of his/her child be. Liberty and democracy should be introduced when the student is still in classrooms by way of granting the ward the choice of what one receives. We didn’t invent education to make industrial slaves who would learn quickly through rote and be ready for work when they are matured for such work. The gradual process of education should respect the needs and interests of the protégé and be customised to make it learner centric for education to realize its fullest benefits to the individual and society at large. We can begin the process of re-inventing education by reviving indigenous arts and crafts, translating native texts to different languages to make them accessible for our large and vast mass of people. The efforts though conceived originally as welfare measures to people would have far reaching implications in establishing micro-entrepreneurs across the breadths of the country, creating jobs and markets to fully absorb and deliver its merits to the entire population. The radicalisation of education should put in place a system that is different from the existing one that rates performance of the student by assessing his/her ability to reproduce. Ratings should follow qualitative criteria like imagination, innovation; creativity etc. and ways to make such an assessment possible must be found. All efforts should be directed to make education more purposive, i.e., empower the learners to be self-reliant, moral and guarded against victimization. Our social maladies, at least most of them, have their origin in improper and inadequate training of the mind. Legislations or a handful of individuals cannot correct them. Reserving corruption to fewer hands is all that stronger legislations can do, by inflating the cost of corrupt services. Stronger legislations, if at all, will marginalise the deprived even more, leaving us no plausible short term fix for the problem. A comprehensive re-alignment of our policies and strategy towards primary education is our only tool to repair the fault lines in our society.