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.