Some thoughts on Education

One of the benefits of being an educator is that if you ponder deeply enough, you get wonderful insights on what (your) education was, or rather, ought to be. Unsurprisingly, we take education as a means towards a greater end- a flashy career, a worthy spouse. Like individuals, nations obsess over their investments in education; systems and school districts which can provide quality (as measured by standardized testing) and a reasonable equality of access to the local community at the least price are paraded as the hallmarks of excellence. 

The purpose of this article is not to debate this. Surely everyone agrees from personal experience that education goes beyond the 3 Rs (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic). We would not want our students to learn the facts or simply be content with basic literacy (was it boy Einstein who said that one can always look facts up in books? Give me ideas). We would want education to go beyond the narrow confines of one-size-fits-all testing, and concentrate more on skills we deem important- collaboration, integrity, dedication, tolerance, et cetra.

In our quest to create the most ‘efficient’ public schooling, we have laid a great emphasis on the Return on Investments. There are prodigious report-cards of school systems available, detailing how they fare in global battle of educational standards and per-pupil expenditure. But we have paid comparatively little emphasis on what goes on inside our schools, in idyllic classrooms where next Kalidasas and Shakespeares are being reared (to be fair, we in India make a mess of providing basic literacy to our children, let alone the broad-based experience that education should be). If a child’s brain is naturally inclined to learn new things, what is so stubborn about our system that kills the joy of learning? The question is pure rhetoric. Our schools do a terrible job of making learning enjoyable- not for a test, an exam, an evaluation- but for the simple pleasures of learning. 

There is no royal road to Geometry :)

A youth who had begun to read geometry with Euclid, when he had learnt the first proposition, inquired, "What do I get by learning these things?" So Euclid called a slave and said "Give him threepence, since he must make a gain out of what he learns."

I do not wish to emulate the famous Euclid. As every teacher knows, the art of teaching consists in large part of interesting people in things that ought to interest them, but do not. But if everything that I have taught my students were to be naught, reduced to a single sentence, it would surely have to be- Learn, for learning sake! Because once they do it, their labour will never be commoditized, their skills never irrelevant.

They would have understood then what it took their Bhaiya so many years- that education is an end in itself, and so it must continue for life.