One of the biggest mistakes of the Indian educational system is that perhaps we have not yet abandoned the Lord Macaulay inspired schooling system which was designed to supply clerical staff to the East India Company and its successor, the British crown and its officialdom. The level of clerk you could aspire (and the commensurate salary) to be depended a lot on whether you were a matriculate, a graduate or a post graduate and the mindset has not yet gone, nearly a hundred and fifty years after his famous “minute” that has shaped the educational destiny of millions of Indians.
The biggest sufferer is creativity in this whole scheme of things and people who want to think and act out of the box. When conventional society espouses conventional education, few people would like to step outside the system and face ridicule, scorn or simple disillusionment. One of the reasons why India has fared so poorly in sports is the scant recognition given to those who want to take up sports as a career, with cricket perhaps being the rare exception and that too in certain instances. Otherwise, sports were and are only of value in fetching a few extra weightage while getting into college.
Even today, the norm is for parents are to discourage children from sports and a whole range of extracurricular activities that are of value. Besides by connecting salaries and affluence to degrees and diplomas, a message is being sent out to millions in this country who for reasons of poverty, lack of opportunities or simply because they are intellectually challenged cannot pursue “higher education” as we understand it conventionally, that they are doomed to poverty and that they will always be on the margins of society.
Is that a message that the government ought to be sending? After all, while schooling is a part of education and contributes to it definitely, in no uncertain terms, education is not schooling. The pursuit of education is a lifelong one and might and often does material gains too; but schooling has a beginning and an end. May be someone should remind the minister that the greatest men and women in history were not often educated in the conventional sense; in fact they were often illiterate.
The biggest sufferer is creativity in this whole scheme of things and people who want to think and act out of the box. When conventional society espouses conventional education, few people would like to step outside the system and face ridicule, scorn or simple disillusionment. One of the reasons why India has fared so poorly in sports is the scant recognition given to those who want to take up sports as a career, with cricket perhaps being the rare exception and that too in certain instances. Otherwise, sports were and are only of value in fetching a few extra weightage while getting into college.
Even today, the norm is for parents are to discourage children from sports and a whole range of extracurricular activities that are of value. Besides by connecting salaries and affluence to degrees and diplomas, a message is being sent out to millions in this country who for reasons of poverty, lack of opportunities or simply because they are intellectually challenged cannot pursue “higher education” as we understand it conventionally, that they are doomed to poverty and that they will always be on the margins of society.
Is that a message that the government ought to be sending? After all, while schooling is a part of education and contributes to it definitely, in no uncertain terms, education is not schooling. The pursuit of education is a lifelong one and might and often does material gains too; but schooling has a beginning and an end. May be someone should remind the minister that the greatest men and women in history were not often educated in the conventional sense; in fact they were often illiterate.
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