Education's Many Tongues

Education’s Many Tongues

Before we talk of education, let us salute some of the great, uneducated people who changed the world with the light of their own intelligence. The Wright brothers built the first flyable airplane. Ed ‘Doc’ Ricketts became an ecological expert and invented such terms as ‘Ecosystem’ and ‘Habitat’. Steve Jobs was the mastermind behind the mega company ‘Apple’. Benjamin Franklin helped to establish libraries and universities, made huge advance in electricity as a scientist, invented lightning rod, bifocals etc. and was one of the founding fathers of United States. Gregor Mendel was the father of Science of Genetics. Henry Ford manufactured motor vehicles. John D. Rockefeller was the world’s first billionaire. Rabindranath Tagore avoided classroom schooling, yet won the Nobel Prize for literature and founded Visva Bharati University at Santiniketan. William Shakespeare, till date the world’s greatest writer, only knew ‘small Latin and less Greek.’ But unknowingly, we use  many Shakespearean words and phrases in our daily English conversation : ‘last but not least’, ‘a foregone conclusion’, ‘Good riddance’, ‘The be all and end all’ ‘A wild goose chase’, ‘Auspicious’, ‘Bated breath’, ‘Spotless reputation’, ‘Baseless’ ‘All that glitters is not gold, ‘Watchdog’, ‘A laughing stock’, ‘Fair play’ etc. Those outstanding people unleashed their inventiveness, imagination and talent and created everlasting work which changed mankind and enhanced the world.

But formal education is absolutely necessary in the flowering of an individual’s potential. Literacy rate is an important datum to judge a country’s progress. Leaders all over the world have made huge effort to impart education to their citizens even on a war footing. Cuba’s Fidel Castro sent out teachers called ‘literacy brigades’ into the island’s hinterland to impart education. Gujarat government’s iCreate, an incubation centre, provides youth the opportunity to make their ideas see the light of the day. In Scandinavia, the system of ‘Forest Kindergarten’ model provides unstructured playtime to the children in natural setting which enhances their learning ability and develops their natural curiosity.

 Due to modern technology, innovations in education all over the world are increasing in leaps and bounds. In some classrooms in South Korea, students learn English from Engkey, a robot English teacher. Gems Modern Academy in Dubai has classrooms and labs connected by a super-high-speed fiber optic network through which science lessons are delivered on a 3D platform.

In India, the situation is somewhat lopsided. While kids in junior classes are burdened with heavy school bags, their mind stuffed with bookish information and a plethora of class tests, quarterly, half-yearly etc. to test their mechanical memory and not  their knowledge or comprehension, the students of 10^th and 12^th board answer  objective-type questions so that they can easily score  99%. Colleges have cut-out marks hovering only in the range of 95% or above. Now the trendy thing is to score 100 % in English. Coaching classes have become the most profitable business in India today. There are such teachers  who give recorded lectures to students while being absent from class .And then there is a 29 year-old teacher called Rajinikanth Mendhe  who travels 50 kilometers daily in his motor cycle to go to a village called Chandra (100 kilometers away from Pune) to teach his class which comprises of only one student , Yuvraj Sangdale. Mr.Mendhe is very dedicated in his work .He uses solar power in this backward village to teach Yuvraj through e-learning facilities.

Violence in school campus all over the world is very scary. In United States, gun violence in school campuses has devastating influence on children and teens. In 2018 itself there have been 53 incidents of gunfire on school grounds. In India, violence is of another kind where a senior of a reputed school killed his junior, a seven-year-old boy, to escape exams. In West Bengal, a student broke his teacher’s nose because the teacher objected to his fiddling with the cell phone during teaching hours. Sometimes teachers beat up students viciously. Even cartoons (meant for kids) are not free from violence, so much so, ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoon series are banned in Egypt because they propagate too much brutality.

E.R. Braithwaite’s world famous autobiographical novel, ‘To Sir with Love’ (1959) dealt with this problem of indiscipline in an innovative way. In this school in East End of London, he was black and his students were white. Those reckless students were grown-ups with maturing bodies and adept in teacher-baiting. Mr. Braithwaite struck a deal with them. He treated them as adults and allowed them to decide which topics they wished to study. In return, they must respect him as a teacher. He also encouraged extra-curricular activities such as a visit to the museum. In this way he motivated those unresponsive students to learn. He did not exercise rigid control over them but developed their dormant intelligence. Such discipline which resulted from intelligence diminished the violent streak in the students and taught them self-discipline.

Learning is a two-way process. Teachers and students learn from each other but teachers learn the most. Teachers can get hardwired of hackneyed and boring viewpoints and force students to believe of how a thing is or should be. But students with their fresh outlook sell a new reality. They have the capacity to raise a teacher’s standards, widen his limiting beliefs and change his strategy. In this age of internet and social media when the student is bombarded with information, teachers and parents should be like helmsmen who must steer the boat of the student safely through the storms and take him to the shore of refinement, freedom and conscious intelligence.

List of my Routine Reread Novels

List of my Routine Reread Novels

My early memories of reading novels started during my school days when the best-loved were Enid Blyton’s adventure stories. Then in my teens, I was introduced to Barbara Cartland’s romantic novels. They were banned in the school library and the school premises but somehow the books were smuggled in the class and exchanged among   the girls. Since the books were forbidden, they were all the more irresistible. Those novels were love stories between very beautiful, accomplished women and very handsome, extraordinary men who met, fell in love, and lived happily ever after.

 Then in class eleven we had a Pulitzer Prize –winning novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee in our curriculum. The central character was Atticus Finch, an American lawyer but he was far from being a hero material. In fact, the fiftyish widower Atticus Finch was so ordinary that even his school-going children Scout and Jem were embarrassed of him. He did not play any games; he was an introvert who spent his free time in reading and watching TV. But when the   crunch time came he stood up with a warlike attitude, coping single-handedly against his enemies. That was the first time when we realized that a true hero is the one who is a man of character. Looks, wealth, superficial smartness are secondary to the man who is morally upright and fights for truth. Atticus Finch was defending a black American who was falsely accused of raping a white girl. This happened in a county in Alabama, in the southern state of USA, before the civil war when slavery of blacks was prevalent.  Atticus Finch was ostracized by his own white society and his children were bullied in school by the white children wherein Atticus was called a ’nigger lover’. But Atticus still carried on with a military attitude of his soul against his fight for racial injustice and even forbade his children to get provoked by name calling and harassment. He lost the case but his splendid heroism won our hearts. It was made into an Oscar-winning movie where Atticus Finch was played by Gregory Peck. 

The alluring novels of boy meets girl, of candlelight dinners and ballroom dancing were over and we craved for real characters, which were true to life. Sensing our enthusiasm, our English teacher suggested that we should read ‘Gone with the Wind’ which had the same setting and had won a Pulitzer Prize too.  It is written by Margaret Mitchell and is also based in the southern states of USA (in Georgia). It is an epic, historical novel in five parts, with many characters. The main theme is a love story against the backdrop of the American civil war. Rhett Butler loves Scarlett O’Hara but she loves Ashley Wilkes. Ashley loves Melanie Hamilton and marries her.  The hero Rhett Butler steals the show. He is more of an anti-hero who adopted questionable methods to pursue his businesses, who visited a disreputable house, who hurt people with his outspokenness but he was a man of truth. He did not put on a show .He helped needy people and truly loved Scarlett, the heroine. On the other hand, Ashley, the copybook hero, well read and well mannered turned out to be a fake, a pseudo-intellectual because he exploited Scarlett’s love for him .He was happily married, yet he kept Scarlett in expectation, thus destroying her married life with Rhett Butler.  This was made into a super hit movie starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. I read this novel often because of the lessons it taught me:  to differentiate between hypocrites and men of action; that a man can have some grey shades but he can still be a hero if his actions are based on truth. I also like the witty dialogue of Rhett Butler and his smart one-liners.

The third novel was in my college curriculum, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen. I read this novel frequently because of the heroine Elizabeth Bennet. Her sister Jane was more beautiful than her but Elizabeth stood out because of her sizzling character and her tremendous self-respect which did not allow her to cozy up to the most eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy. She was prejudiced against Darcy because of his pride. Darcy was proud of his wealth, his looks and his upper class family lineage but Elizabeth with her fiery character and blazing, black eyes brought him to his knees.  I read this novel because of Elizabeth and also because of the English society which seemed somewhat similar to Indian society. Elizabeth’s mother Mrs.Bennet’s only aim in life was to get wealthy husbands for her five daughters. When she heard that Mr.Bingley, a rich, eligible bachelor had come in her neighborhood she decided to catch him by hook or by crook. She and her family were often insulted because of their inferior social status (compared to Bingley and Darcy) but she persisted nevertheless and became successful in getting Jane married to Mr.Bingley. She is so much like Indian mothers. It was twice made into a movie; in 1940 and in 2005.

The fourth novel is Rebecca, written by Daphne du Maurier.It’s a murder mystery and romance rolled into one. It is written through the eyes of the hero Maximilian de Winter’s second wife who was an orphan and a companion to a rich, middle aged American socialite. Maximilian had met her in a hotel in Monte Carlo and had married her in haste. Rebecca was Maximilian’s first wife and throughout the novel, the second wife remained nameless. When the novel began, Rebecca had already died in a boat accident but the whole novel is only about Rebecca, Rebecca and Rebecca. She was very beautiful, aristocratic, accomplished in everything; be it throwing parties, interior designing, socializing, riding horses, looking after the vast Manderley estate etc. She had designed the de Winter’s mansion, the garden and everything in Manderley immaculately so that it had become a tourist attraction.  She had set the daily menu, party menu and the guest list for the parties. The servants and especially the fishy, dominating housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers followed Rebecca’s rule even after her death. So much so the second wife was afraid to touch anything in the house or make any alterations in the plans for fear that the well-oiled household would stop functioning. Even the society held Rebecca in high esteem, thus isolating the second wife. The second wife’s anguish was heightened because she felt that her husband didn’t love her and he was still in love with his dead wife. All along the narrative there is an undercurrent of suspense which makes the novel a superb thriller.   Towards the end there is a marvelous twist in which the mystery is unraveled.

I read this novel because of the engrossing plot and the description of the  house , the sea, the seven star, luxurious daily living; the sumptuous  breakfasts, high teas and dinners, the lavish socializing; in short the lifestyle of a super wealthy, classy English landlord to the smallest detail. This was also made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest master of suspense.

I reread Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s   detective novels on winter nights or rainy evenings because they create the correct atmosphere. They become all the more fascinating because the murderer is known to me and it’s thrilling to watch the games the characters play to dodge the detectives.

Many of Agatha Christie’s novels were made into films ;such as ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, ‘Death on the Nile’, ‘Evil under the Sun’ , ‘The Mirror Crack’d etc. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series is also popular in the movie and television circuits. The Hound of the Baskervilles is not only a popular English movie but also a super hit film in Hindi (Bees Saal Baad, Biswajit and Waheeda Rehman).

These books are my best friend and they have sustained me in times of isolation and sorrow as well as jubilation and joy. The movies on these literary classics were no doubt excellent but the joy of reading written words is unsurpassable. Herein lies the glory of literature. While too much TV and movies make us mentally fatigued, a book enhances our intellect, strengthens our imagination and brings clarity into our lives.