I have always thought of education as a process, and not as a product to be bought and sold like “Assam Tea” in an education emporium. I conceive of it as a process of change in a person that enables him or her to do things, to think things, to experience sensations, and to respond to stimuli in ways that otherwise would not have been possible. I take it as axiomatic or provable that what a person is able to do or to think and his or her aesthetic responses are influenced, inter alia, by the nature and extent of the persons education, in and out of school, the persons talents of intellect and personality; the scope that the society in which the individual lives allows for exercising them. Education is a main transmitter of culture to succeeding generations – a key component in my definition of socialisation. Education may be looked upon as a process with a history, a present and a future. Francis Parker very aptly remarked, “Education is life, not preparation for life.
The aim of education should be to teach the child to think, not what to think. The idea of education as preparation and of adulthood as a fixed limit of growth are two sides of the same obnoxious untruth”. Education is a highly personal process that is unique to every individual. Ultimately, the responsibility for the success of education resides with the individual, for it is he/she who has to interpret reality and make use of these interpretations.
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In a democratic nation, learning is a precious element “of life” and “all through life”, it is a continuing or recurrent possibility – whether it enhances one’s possibility to earn a living, or to deepen and enrich one’s personal awareness and understanding. But paradoxically, there is great distrust of education and educators generally and more so when financial austerity is becoming the order of the day. Students have become such manipulated beings so often hostile to one another, so often fearing one another. They are torn within themselves, incapable of finding any inner peace, often pre-occupied with self-examination and so rarely discovering reassurance and a sense of uplift. We have therefore a primary responsibility, to examine these characteristics of formlessness and confusion and search for countervailing forces. The future pattern of education requires an urgent bringing about of the blending of “Independence” and “Interdependence”.
Educators today are caught up in a maze of aimless “Busyness”, engaged in a little of something, but nothing of anything effective in particular. In fact, the education al institutions today are literally dying out because they have neither insight to read the signs of times, nor the alertness and the will to leave the beaten tracks of mediocrity and routine, to face the challenges offered by time. To give a meaning to education, educators have to give priorities to goal setting, planning and evaluation in education. The common view of schooling is that its concern is preparation for a life of the adult as a worker-citizen-parent.
So far as his education assists in the solution of life’s problems as he sees them as a student, it is because these are identifiable as examples of problems (for e.g. moral dilemmas) which have more than a local significance in time and place.
Parents want children who could earn money or could acquire the skills to advance their social and economic position. Everybody speaks of ‘values and morals’ on the decline. But the fact is that educational institutions are undermining moral values taught by parents.
The heads of an institution of leaning are largely no intellectual giants, but for the most part well-intentioned and hard pressed men of practical affairs. They worry about planning, constituencies, students and always, money, money, money. The more intelligent students and the more self-critical faculty know that there is no convincing defensible strategy behind the undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum. Equal access to opportunity for all citizens has come to mean the discrimination on the basis of sex, race, age, creed and class is legally forbidden and alien to these cultures official rhetoric. But education traditionally has been founded on principles of discrimination and sorting. Suddenly it seems that young men are in too much of a hurry to become doctors, engineers, lawyers, administrators. But none of them wants to be something else in addition to above-a cultured man, and they are canny enough to know that the time has already gone by when one might conjure the structure already established or concentrate on refining one branch of that structure. Result! The result is that after several years of college or university, the student either stumbles around a mind cluttered with disorderly piles of books or can mentally flex a developed arm in an otherwise flaccid body.
General education which is in retreat needs reformulation. Medicine, law, engineering, architecture and management must have a scholarly base; their faculties should be intent on the extension and exploration of knowledge in those fields. By the same token, the academic disciplines can and should expand their purviews to encompass and comment upon the use of knowledge so as to offer students wide-ranging, individualised programmes and to combine the students purely professional interest-in getting a job-with their educational interests. After all, the country is being swept by a new wave of interest in what is called the “external degree”, an opportunity to earn an associate or baccalaureate degree by nontraditional mean.
(The author is an advocate, international law consultant and Human Rights activist)
