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| Edited By: Seema Kamdar |Source: DNA |Updated: Jun 20, 2017, 08:10 AM IST
Early this year, Ragini Gode, a student from Wani, Yavatmal district, Maharashtra, committed suicide after giving her HSC exams. She feared she had done badly. It turns out she got over 77 per cent.
The dreaded end-of-summer ritual is upon us — the season of depressed and anxious students running helter-skelter in the aftermath of their not-so-satisfactory secondary and higher secondary school results. What kind of pressure are we bringing to bear upon our young that they find it easier to take their own lives than put up with the consequences of a disappointing performance in one single academic examination? The 10th and 12th class results are do-or-die. If you do not make it to the course of your choice, you are clearly a loser. A single mark sheet thrust in our hands in our teen years determines our sense of self-worth for the rest of our lives.
Clearly, our education paradigm is a paradox. It pares and sifts our existence through an unforgiving sieve of marks and makes us miserable. We are shovelled into a school where we compete in everything with everyone around us, and our sense of self-worth is measured in terms of how much ahead of the others we are. The coaching classes and tuition industry, pegged at Rs 3 lakh crore, is growing at 35 per cent on the strength of our craven need to compete.
The unidimensional Macaulay system, that we have stubbornly refused to revisit, churns out well-informed and self-serving humanoids that know only how to live in a competitive market where the jungle law of survival applies. Is this really education?
“The future of the world is in my classroom today,” wrote educator Ivan Welton Fitzwater in a poem. Any education should aim to empower us with the right thinking, right values and right approach to life. It should tell us it’s alright to fail. It should tell us we need not all be toppers. It should make us confident and comfortable with ourselves. It should teach us how to value others, live harmoniously, and contribute to society.
Ironically, this is a roster of just what our education does not do. As Mahatma Gandhi, cited in the draft National Education Policy 2016, said, “We assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock exchange market. We want to provide only such education as would enable the student to earn more. We hardly give any thought to the improvement of the character of the educated.”
Academic knowledge gets us far but holistic value education empowers us with life skills to evolve and gel as a community. In the anxiety to compete, we do not know how to cooperate and coexist. The me-first approach is destroying the individual as well as societal fabric thread by thread.
In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill saw the development of character as “a solution to social problems and a worthy educational ideal”. In The Abolition of Man, CS Lewis objected to the reduction of all emotions to subjectivism, and argued that the purpose of education is to train children to like and dislike what they “ought to”. Much before him, German philosopher Immanuel Kant defined “ought” as an innate sense of right and wrong in human beings that he called “a priori” knowledge. It is this inner knowledge that education needs to harness and hone for the betterment of the individual as well as society at large.
The Indian Gurukul system moulded the student’s character and personality as a whole — students learned practical knowledge and skills, correct behaviour, the importance of respecting other people and living beings, understanding nature, and living in harmony instead of forever being miserable trying to be one up on everyone else.
All syllabi need not be about metrics. There is a world at stake between developing competence and developing competition. Till we achieve a state of harmony in our educational battlefield, the conflict in our homes and society will stay.
The author is a senior journalist and a communications consultant
