HIGHER
EDUCATION: HOW HIGH?
Khaliqur
Rahman
In
a Utopian situation, Material Power respects Spiritual Power and Spiritual Power
reciprocates. Mutual respect defines the limits. Discipline and balance are
maintained. The ideal starts moving from the imaginative to the real.
In
ideal times like this, there must have been a kingdom where appropriate
facilities must have been available for learning and teaching. Sufficient
centres like gurkuls, pathshalas,
madrasas, maktabs must have been
there for proper education. The teachers must have been mentors, guides and
philosophers to befit the words like guru,
ustad and murshid. They must have
guided, instructed, trained and taught very well. Their main objective must
have been to see that their students developed a healthy mind, body and spirit.
The
Wheel of Time then must have moved half a circle on. Things must have declined.
Good sense must have given in to non-sense. The ruler must have been the very
first victim of non-sense. He must have waged a war against the Neighbour.
Surely, good counsel – the sensible rajaguru
- must have warned him against a war. But swollen heads often have deaf ears.
The raja must have ignored the raja.guru. Following the war, the
coffers must have gone empty. Budget cuts must have been imposed. As always,
the first victim must have been the guruji
The
guruji, one day, out of sheer
every-lessness in the household, must have got a fit of madness. The egghead
then must have asked the zamindar through
his son for ghee. The zamindar must have obliged him rather
too ghee-fully, of course, in the
hope of a smooth and prospective career for his son in return who must have
surely outscored the guruji’s son
who, in turn, must have preferred to make a career as a darogha because he would receive the ghee from the zamindar, any way, even without having
to teach anyone’s son. The guruji
must have okayed his career plans.
The
success story of the zamindar’s son
and the secret story of the guruji’s
son , both, must have spread like wild fire, rapidly, or like hot news, widely,
or like a secret, surreptitiously,. Secrets are things, like kuchra, that you want your friends and
neighbours to keep.
Soon,
the key to children’s success must have been with every one and all the gurujis must have had more than belly-full
supply of ghee.
But
one day, he must have thought that this way his self-respect and social
prestige would be completely ruined and lost. That day, he must have cursed the
king because the only way to save his self-respect and prestige was to have got
the ghee from the king and not from
all and sundry. In complete frustration, he must have taken the Ganges to the
Arab Sea and that too without delta.
The
present day schooling, the modern day mushrooming of coaching centres running
chains of various different classes and courses and the contemporary examining
bodies at schools, colleges and universities including various different boards
and bodies conducting entrance examinations must all thank the king who didn’t
send enough ghee to the guruji!
Before
a good, conscientious teacher decides, out of sheer helplessness, to begin to
mishandle the future of children, the authorities would do well to handle him
with care because a teacher is very breakdownable and he knows how to give it
back. If you dodge him today, he’ll dodge you back, too. But you’ll begin to
fall in good thirty years!
Hasn’t
that already happened? Hasn’t Higher Education become Wider Education? Our own
language Hindi expresses it better: Uchcha Shiksha? No, Tuchchha Shiksha!
Education should aim at making human beings out of Man. It can be achieved through physical, mental and spiritual development of the child.
ReplyDeleteEducation, therefore, should not be examination oriented. Gandhi had warned against such education. But in the last six decades or so, we've done exactly the opposite of what Gandhi had said. The result is: we've developed all other things except human beings. Thank God, we've got a very small minority of spiritually developed souls, I mean human beings. And mind you, human beings are neither corrupt nor criminal. Man can be corrupt and criminal, not human beings.
To develop human beings out of Man, I'll go for inclusion of certain things in our education system. Our children should learn how to think and solve problems independently. I'll go for vectorization of the child's mind. This can be done by chanting of Mantras of any religion. This way the mind is trained to think. Once the child is able to think in one direction, he's on the right track to develop problem solving. I'd include teaching of classical music and drawing also as Music develops good sense and Drawing sharp observation.
Once they're able to tackle problems on their own, I'd go for elementary computer training and use of internet. This will teach them how to access knowledge and information.
This will enable the course designers to design very short courses. This will eliminate rote learning and the kids will be encouraged to do creative-thinking.
To implement all this a complete overhaul is required along with rigorous teacher-training.
Otherwise, in education nowadays everyone, teachers included, is lugging huge weight of information like a coolie and transporting it from teacher-notes to student-notes to examination scripts. And, they get near 100%(!) without knowing the content - the coolie does not know what there is inside the suitcase.
In the end, I must say, education is a serious matter that should be taken seriously. But sadly, in a democratic set up, every next person is an expert and, I'm afraid, if it is marketocratic, education may not be completely reduced to a product that sells.