Education A dukhniwaran ?
“Ours is a society that ‘worship’ the success and ‘adores’ the toppers. ”
The experience of learning or having fun in getting knowledge is all quantitative and not qualitative.
The craze for Marks has converted the student into a smart consumer where he has to take the tablets of knowledge in form of facts, theorems, numbers, etc
In a world of this kind, there is no poetic wonder, no criticality of social science, and no enquiring spirit of science. One is only an exam warrior.
Moreover, as the “fact-centric”/“objective”/short questions become the new normal, and the power of memorization is the key to success.
Those who get even 95 percent tend to suffer from depression. This is nothing but violence — the disease of “success” causing the stigma of “failure”.
It is also important to realize that many of these young students hardly find any guidance as they choose their subjects and enter colleges.
Academic streams are hierarchized through the markets, young students — often pressured by the anxiety-ridden parents, and driven by the so-called ‘perfect’ culture — tend to prefer “prestigious” subjects like Physics, Economics, Commerce, English literature, and Psychology, even if they are not intrinsically inclined to these subjects.
For eg, St Stephen’s or Lady Shri Ram College is often considered as a fancy “brand”.
It is nowadays very obvious to find students who, because of the “brand consciousness”, prefer the “prestigious” college rather than the subject of their liking. The subject — Sanskrit or Education — doesn’t matter.
Today’s education is nothing but:-
Tight bodies, heavily-loaded school bags, weekly tests, never-ending home assignments, constant performance anxiety, parental pressure, and the urge to be a “topper”.
The world they inhabit has no rainbow, no sunset, no music; it only breeds psychic anxiety and some sort of melancholy.
Even though Rabindranath Tagore initiated the concept of open environment classes, but to no vails.
And no matter how much we value these “toppers”, or feel proud of these “top-ranking” colleges, the society we are creating is bound to be toxic and violent.
Yes, depression, loneliness, and schizophrenia are bound to characterize the restless generation. In the coming years, newspapers, it seems, would start writing editorials about students’ suicides.
So what is the way out?
An answer to this question is possible only if we acquire the courage to accept that one’s curiosity, aptitude, and awakened intelligence cannot be measured through a pattern of examination that compels one to be a robotic performer rather than a creative wanderer.