VIEWPOINT
Ajay Kalra
On Education
Education is a serious subject. It seems to have become serious also in terms of its health. Sometimes, it seems that what we have in the name of education is just an apology. At best it is just literacy – right from the primary stage to the higher education. Education needs a much deeper understanding of the subject. It needs patience to allow the knowledge to sink in. But where is the time or the inclination to do so. There is no infrastructure, no faculty. There are schools having no buildings or are being run in dilapidated ones. The number of teachers is appallingly short. The country ranks 100 in terms of student - teacher ratio in the 171 countries surveyed. Even this small number of teachers are burdened with all sorts other tasks - from community work, to election duties, to making children go out in processions or for making human chains for events organized by governments and NGOs - just to satisfy the ego of the masters that be - so that these important persons get some good mileage in the media. Teachers are poorly paid and yet often cheated even in this matter. Sometimes teachers get jobs by paying bribes or by using unfair means in the exams. This ensures the ruin of not one but several generations. In fact, it is in schools that corruption gets seeded in the very early years in life. Admissions on false birth certificates, by donations and passing board exams by bribery is so much in vogue that today it seems as nothing abnormal. Later, the pressure to crack the competitive exams after class 12 is so great that children opt out of formal school after class 10 and join coaching institutes. The class 11 and 12 exams are taken care of by “dummy” schools of these coaching centers. The board curriculum takes a backseat and children from poor family remain at a disadvantage.
The situation is nearly the same in schools of higher education. Things get so rushed and cramped that before we realize, we are out of the college with a degree but not the skill to handle our first assignment. Remember the old practitioners of medicine just a few decades back? They were skilled enough to deal with so many emergencies, conduct deliveries and perform minor surgeries. Can a medical graduate of today give even first aid? Hardly, because today’s medical undergraduate gets busy after the first professional in attending the evening coaching classes for PG admission at the cost of all practical experience. It is only after finishing post-graduation that a medico learns first aid under the fanciful name of “basic life support”. It is just ditto for other fields of higher education like engineering etc. The road side electrician or a computer mechanic seems to be much better than the engineering graduate. In any case, the engineering graduate is into every other job except the one for which he has studied. No wonder many of these engineering institutions which grew like mushrooms are getting closed down.
We talk of increasing the number of institutions. But where is the faculty and where is the infrastructure? Is this increase in institutes destined to produce unskilled manpower? Often, in the quest for too many, the resources get divided and diverted, leaving the existing ones bleeding and bruised. It is not money alone that can build institutions. Developing a worthy work culture is much more important.
Development ? Really ?
We are all quite keen for development around us. But, sometimes this word scares us as well because everything can happen in its name. For example, we can see some good strong old structure being demolished and replaced with one of poor quality. Fences and grills will get erected at places where they are not needed and will disappear within a few days. And all this may be forced upon us without our needing it only to be told that it is being done for our sake.
We know that everyone needs a house to live in. But we also start buying houses to invest. That increases their demand to much more than they are actually needed. This leads to creating jungles of concrete and eats up the open lands and fields.
The roads are needed too. We cut trees for this. Also, but at the sides of the road we make pucca pavements that also cover the soil which used to soak the rain water. We do all this in the name of development and then we make some feeble efforts in the name of “rain harvesting”.
True, everyone deserves to own a car as well. But now we have more of huge fat vehicles that throw up tons of poison.
Besides destroying the ecology such developments lead to pollution which in turn is the cause of so many illnesses. Natural calamities are also not far away.
The word development also worries me because we see our money being spent for buying of worthless or poor quality of machinery and equipment which will not work even for a few days or weeks - again all in the name of development. You ask for one you will get two just like you ask for a pistol, you will get a cannon. It makes our providers so happy.
Development also seems to be making people go for jobs at distant places bringing the family and social fabric under tremendous stress. While gadgets available now have made many things so convenient and helpful, they have also become the vehicles of crime and self destruction. We seem to know of the things happening far away or about those for whom we cannot do anything, but have got distanced from our own family and near ones. Narcissism has found a new name – “selfie”.
Such a situation was so well described in the early 1970s by Alvin Toffler in his book “Future Shock”. We can see that happening today and may be we can try to learn from it.