Prof Javed Mughal
I believe and have frequently told my beloved readers that educational system has progressed during the last one hundred years hundred times more than it has done during the last thousand years. Despite this colossal and mind-blowing progress of education and knowledge explosion, we still feel as if there were something very vital lacking in it. A teacher, as usual, unlike many others in the past, go to the class, deliver lecture, disperse cut and dried material among the students and come back. This is, according to me, the most hackneyed and fruitless method of teaching, off-course, having a crippling impact on the creative capacity of our generation. We have produced doctoral degree holders but at the same time we have utterly failed to give our society the likes of Tagore, Ghosh, Sarojini Naidu, Saher, Faiz and so on; we engineered great scientists but we could not discover Aryabhata, APJ Abdul Kalam, Arun Netravali, Homi Jehangir Bhabha and Jagdish Chandra Bose; we loaded our society with countless engineers and architects but the question is whether our system has generated anyone of the caliber of Charles Babbage, George Herman Babcock, & Wilcox-the great engineers of the world and above all our political leaders are also the by-product of this educational industry but they are, too, an utter failure in filling up the vacuum of our political ancestors. Anyone with analytical bent of mind can agree on the point that we have stopped seeing great and visionary leaders after the death of Indira Gandhi. She was almost a full-stop to a long sentence of great leaders in India.
We have pandits and molvis but still we feel a great dearth of religious mentors and true scholars in the current age. No doubt we have a small number of good scholars but they stand overshadowed by pseudo-religious-scholarship. But the question is as to why did all this happen. What is wrong with our educational domain? This all is to be considered vigilantly and honestly. Something vital to the practical and life oriented education is missing from the present system. One day a student of college asked me in the class: “why are we not able to cope up with time and pressure? Are we productive enough with all the electronic gadgets we have? It has become difficult to handle children as they bring pressures from school and college. What is going on? My parents always have happy stories to narrate of their childhood and speak of their achievements with pride, when did we change?” I startled for a moment, gathered up the courage, racked up my brain (because this question was ticklish enough to be tackled) and asked him, “Have you heard of the word commitment? We have stopped making education the part of our perception, our sentiments and the very character of our life. We have to refrain from treating education a mere tool for earning livelihood and becoming millionaire. Monitory consideration has to be replaced with object of enriching ethical, moral and humanitarian outlook while traveling through the thorny shrubs of education to the fragrant zone of success. The coordination of thought and action is important for self esteem and that is what makes us stress free. The gadgets have made our lives easy and lazy but they have failed to enhance our creativity. There is latent energy that demands expression and when we bottle it up it unfolds itself in the form of anger and stress. Education has remained in books, internet and the so called new methodology of teaching (helping the brain to function in steps). Human beings have a strong mind that can create and understand projects; educational system has to give space for common sense.
We find high profiled institutions giving out executives, they do excel in presentation but they fail to execute their knowledge due to the constraints of the methodology of education system. Our teacher who, most of them don’t know even an iota of what they teach in their class-rooms. I have seen many while committing the study-notes to the memory and reproducing all this on the chalk-boards making the students more confused and confounded. They are criminal and equally criminal is the system that has allowed such blank teachers to continue despite their ingrained incompetence. The word ‘teacher’ has diluted the essence of teaching. Most of the teachers do nothing else than repeating the text book information in the classroom allowing no students to ask questions. We stuff the students’ mind with information, and take them to the laboratories or we help them finish a project work; they work under pressure and fear and that is carried forward to in the functioning of life. We have to show them both positive and negative sides of life, teaching them to negate the false and accept the truth. Let the student experience failure if he has to, that will make him original and stronger.
A teacher is one who can purposefully handle young minds as most of their time is spent in school. A teacher is one who makes his students understand the real meaning of life. Parents have to be teachers at home understanding the child’s potential and help them choose the subjects they love to study. High expectations of the parents in education, values, morals, conduct takes away the freedom of expression as the children of today let their parents live on denial! What can bring about freedom in education? A petty mind trying to be superior remains the same always, greedy mind trying to be generous stays greedy; there is a continuous process of learning and teaching but the core of it is still ignorance. It is a fact that, which is necessary, is fashioned by the mind and the mind then is taught to accept what it has fashioned. The mind can be trained to accept any belief if it satisfies the necessity. We should guide our generation to think, discriminate, analyse and help us to choose what is good and bring about a positive revolution in our minds. What is a mind to do that is caught in its own net? One part of the mind knows the impermanency of life, no corners to rest; the other part is seeking certainty, a relationship beyond dispute. A struggle to be or not to be leads to sorrow and we are held hostage in our minds. We should have a complete knowledge of life and be committed to every student in grooming him to be confident and transforming him into a good human being.
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