With just one Socrates, one Aryabhatt, one Galileo, one Columbus, one Newton, one Einstein, one Edison, one Homi Bhabha, one Curie, one Gandhi, one Abdul Kalam, and a few other great discoverers, scientists and rebels the world could achieve so much. Just imagine a world with millions of such great spirits. The purpose of education is not merely literacy but development and the kindling of our creative faculties. Education can be a seed for this development. Education should be able to develop and discover a person in four dimensions without which we would just be literate, not educated. The four dimensions are:
1) Develop Thinking and Scientific Habit: Rabindranath Tagore said ‘Education has its only meaning and objects in freedom’. We delude ourselves into believing that we are free, but we are not. We are only free within the limited options that are provided by our ‘perceptions’. Throughout our education, memorizing and analyzing has been stressed. What we lack is the stamina for thinking. We scorn thinking. We analyze the information we collect and call it thinking. This is nothing more than hunting and cooking. With memory and analyzing abilities we can build great call centers, and BPOs for the world but not a great number of research and scientific laboratories. Education is not just transmitting a settled body of knowledge, but developing a scientific habit of mind. Scientific thinking is in terms of uncertainties, possibilities, hypothesis, guesses, and imaginations which lead to research, experiments and explorations. The pinnacle of scientific thinking are splendid inventions, discoveries, and solutions. The scientific habit makes a personal unadaptive to the world. George B. Shaw was quoted as saying “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man”.
2) Discovering the Uniqueness: Real education should enable you to find out what is uniquely ‘you’. The primary purpose of a school is to guide the child in her discovery of herself and to identify and nurture the child's talents. We are imparting education to create money-making machines instead of fulfilled individuals who are able to realize their true potential. The person who has found his ‘true’ vocation in life is a blessed human being. Azim Premji has famously said “Just as every seed contains the future tree; each child is born with infinite potential. Imagine a school, which sees children as seeds to be nurtured. Here the teacher is a gardener who helps to bring out the potential already present in the child. This is very different from the current view, which sees the child as clay to be moulded where the teacher and parents are potters deciding what shape the clay should take". Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. There cannot be a sure way to happiness than doing what you love. Since an early age, if a child is encouraged at what he does, passion can be recognized and developed. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Each person's imagination is different and therefore he has to be guided correctly to choose his occupation in life where he is going to spend a majority of waking hours. A proverb says “If you want to be happy for a day, go on a picnic. If you want to be happy for a week, go on holiday. If you want to be happy for a month, get married. If you want to be happy for a year, inherit wealth. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, do the work that you love”. This uniqueness will ultimately be used for a purpose larger than self.
3) Develop Rational Thinking: Isn’t it surprising that educated people fall prey to all sorts of nonsense like pseudo science and superstitions? We have the so-called educated people full of such junk in their heads. Education should also be a sure killer of the old and dogmatic beliefs which are not required today. If education is learning, it is unlearning as well. Education has created an illusion of knowledge in us, though rational thinking has always been elusive for us. If rational thinking is developed we will save hugely on resources which are currently wasted on our irrational activities. To stretch the point further, educated people with irrational belief systems are the greatest threats to the peace of every society. Education has only made them clever for this mischief. Unlearning the outdated, and learning the new, takes us into the future with confidence that education will not bring harm to humanity but will work for its progress.
4) Develop a World View and Consistent Universal Values: A proper world view is built when we are able to think unbiased, breaking out of our national, social, economic, cultural and religious conditioning. Only when a child is able to break these ceilings of thoughts she shall be able to arrive at her own universal values encompassing the whole humanity. If education does not provide her with this opportunity the society is ready to contaminate her mind with its narrow world view and biased value systems. A student can thus arrive at her own universal values of what is right and wrong, what is important and what is not. People who can be called truly educated were not bogged down by their conditioning. They have always revolted with full vigor. The second freedom struggle of India was taken up by educated people. The great social reformers were educated Indians. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Dr. Maharshi Karve, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar were all educated gentlemen. They were able to see out of the narrow confines of their social settings. They rebelled. They rejected unjust authority, they rejected injustice, they rejected discrimination based on gender, creed, caste or religion. They were fearless in their fight for what was right because they were convinced about what was right. This is a rare gift indeed. Every generation and every society needs rebels who do not adapt. That's education.
Love,
Mahendra Chaturmutha.
