Education!! What is it exactly?

A question in this year's NET paper and our Govt's Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan Ad is the inspiration for this post.
This ad which keeps getting some screen space among other commercials every now and then goes this way - A small girl is walking towards school and saying that from today she wont go to fields with her parents but will go to school. The same ad in newspapers asks parents not to send children to work but to school to get "educated". So what exactly is this "education"?

The first quote from Swami Vivekananda which i had read when i was a boy was "Education is the manifestation of knowledge already in man". I could'nt really comprehend this one then, but after so many years i now know that it deserves a deep analysis. So the purpose of education is to bring out the hidden talents in students. But sadly, thanks to the British, we are sending our children to schools which have become more of marks-fetching machine manufacturing units. We can't really blame the schools though. The mother of a school-going boy in our neighbourhood had come to our house. That boy had never gone for tuitions. But had started going recently. Hence he had no time to play. I asked his mother what was the reason. She replied that the maths teacher wants the answers to be written in the same format(method etc) as she taught in her tuitions! I was annoyed at this. This was murder of maths. But this is what is happening everywhere. We don't find children playing anymore. They don't participate in sports as their studies may be affected. The teachers on the other hand are pressurized from the management to show good results so that they can show to their regulating body that they are performing well!! Same is the state with colleges. Our schools and colleges are now producing citizens who are excellent at cheating others, the nation and themselves. They are trained from childhood to SOMEHOW get marks. This gets extended to their jobs once they grow up.

The vicious circle: Nowadays almost all schools and colleges are run by rich politicians or businessmen through trusts. And we have bodies such as AICTE to look into the quality of education being imparted . We also have accreditions such as NBA which schools and colleges strive to get because that will help them fetch grants and  funds. The university demands that colleges show some minimum pass percentage otherwise the college/school will be questioned. Thus the teachers have to make sure their students score well leading to decline in the quality of education.

 So, education is not about scoring marks and getting a degree. It is about becoming human. It is about gaining knowledge and using it for the betterment of all. It is about producing good responsible citizens. A person who works in his field sincerely is an educated person. A person who sweeps the locality sincerely each day is more educated that the rich guy who shamelessly wastes water on his compound and cars each day. We need to shun this British-infected mentality that a person who learns english is educated. All arts need to be respected. A person who lifts garbage sincerely is not uneducated but an employee who shamelessly draws salary each month without doing any productive work is uneducated.
That which makes rich is not education but that which makes us love and respect everything around us is. Let us become truly educated!

romance, love fight and discrete mathematics!!!!

This is an interesting idea which flashed in my mind on my to Dharwad from Hubli. Sitting on my bike for a pretty long time i suddenly got the thought of a common Hindi film sequence. With it a question and then an amazing romantic answer! So here it is:
The hero is a Pokiri or a Rowdy. But a good person by heart. He keeps teasing a girl(heroine) every now and then. This girl too develops a soft corner for the hero but is reluctant to express it. Now one fine day the hero asks the heroine for a date. She refuses(obviously). This guy being a rowdy gets annoyed and puts a condition. "If you dont come with me for dinner tonight, I will kiss you now in front of everyone!". The heroine is shocked. It is obviously better to have dinner with this maniac than get kissed in public. Moreover he is a rowdy. So he can do anything. So she agrees to go for dinner with him. Now comes the twist in the tail. This guy then kisses her in public. She is really annoyed now. She then accuses him of going back on his word. The hero now begs her to forgive him. The hero starts singing a song to pacify her etc etc etc.  Now the question here is was this begging really necessary? Did he really go back on his word ie did he break his promise?

Now enters the amazing branch of logic. Let 'p' be the statement "you come for dinner tonight" and 'q' be the statement "I will kiss you in front of everyone". So now his statement can be represented as :
 ~p -> q.  (~p here is the statement "you do not come for dinner tonight"). If he had really gone back on his word then this implication should have been false. But an implication a -> b is false only when 'a' is true and 'b' is false. I wont explain why this is the case here because that would need a separate post. Now since this implication is true for all remaining 3 cases ie TT, FF, FT and the hero has kissed this heroine making 'q' True his statement is True and not false. Thus he has not gone back on his word and does not need to pacify her at all!!!!!!!!!!

How the British conquered us and why we got independece

Being an Indian my blood boils whenever I think about the British. But then I started thinking in the other direction. Should we hate them for ruling us? This question which kept cropping up now and then in my mind has led to this post. After a lot of contemplation I have come to the conclusion that the British didn't really betray us. It is we who betrayed ourselves and continue to do that. The British came to India as businessmen. They came here to make money. And they did what any clever businessman would ve done. The Westerners knew that India had plenty of wealth. But they probably never happened to stay here long enough to decide on the psychology of Indians. It took them many centuries to convert the satisfied souls here into dissatisfied ones. The muslim invaders never had a strategy when they invaded india. Their intention was to spread Islam and for that they needed a kingdom. Though they succeeded to some extent they never managed to conquer us completely because the people were still ideological. They still believed in the concept of good and bad. The British knew that the main hurdle to looting this country was this belief. They knew that once the people get isolated from their ideology they can be purchased. So they started out by making people believe that a person in Western outfits is respected. They gave respect to people in Western outfits. They called such a person "gentleman". It was not difficult for them to buy a few indians to wear their outfits and sport them in front of their family and friends. But they didn't stop there. Hindus were in majority then. But many were poor too. Any poor person gets the feeling that God is not helping him out of poverty. So the British gave these people money and told them false stories that they will become rich if they follow Chritianity. They gave them jobs in their army etc. So now they slowly started getting people to follow them. But still their intensions were not met. The self belief and patriotism of indians had to be suppressed. So they decided to bring in a new education system. THEIR education system. It consisted of teaching children THEIR language, THEIR ideologies. To make this popular they used media. They  made people feel that only those who take up their education  are truly educated. To support this claim they gave jobs for students. Thus now these people who had taken up jobs in British raj started lowly treatment of others. The British chose brahmins for this as brahmins then were primarily the custodians of sanatan dharma. With the root poisoned it was now very easy to start looting. It is very well known that they used divide-and-conquer strategy to take hold of india. Surprisingly the majority of soldiers in the British army were indians. The british had many selfish Kings under their control and these kings had let their soldiers to serve the british.

The British finally left India in 1947. Not because they were tired of Gandhi and Congress. But because they knew that there was nothing left to loot here. Moreover they knew that they had enslaved almost every Indian knowingly or unknowingly. Indians then were greedy to make money. They had become cowards unwilling to fight thanks to the ahimsa preached by gandhi. What more, they were happy that most Indians had no self identity. Now being born from these Indians how can we possess any self morale? How can we be patriotic? That is the reason behind corruption. That is the reason behind all our woes. Let us shun the money-based education system introduced by the British to enslave us and produce only accountants. Let us get back to our roots. Let us become truly independent!!