Education or manufacturing machines? A student asks

The Class 10 and 12 board results came as a major source of panic and excitement to most of us. I wasn’t really expecting the bomb to hit that soon! The first week of May and the next two weeks had newspapers, magazines and social media flooded with topper interviews, discussions about admissions and myriad point of views. Amidst the rat race, Darwin’s ‘Survival of the fittest’ was evident. Sadly, here those who survived were the product of the education system which has only promulgated rote learning. For a nation promoting education as an essential means of social development, the board results I saw were hypocritical.

Students here are well trained, not learned. The difference strikes as our cerebrum’s retaining power is immense, and on the other hand, thinking outside the box has become a major task. I hope I don’t break misconceptions about learning. It is clearly defined as a relatively permanent change in behaviour produced by experience. It doesn’t involve mugging up an entire textbook. Learning is based more on the lines of common sense; how a person reacts in unpleasant situations, and how to control pleasures. Recent studies have shown that individuals in good professions, who have had no such exposure to the outside world, fail to deal with job and social lives. l’ve attended school for 14 years to be apprised of different ways to memorise material that we could do easily in the comfort of our home.

Several schools charging exorbitant fee for transforming a human being into a fully functioning robot. A child transformed into a calculator, storing bookish knowledge in the CPU – definitely cannot be classified as intelligence.

Am I even educated?  Spoiler alert! Not really. Neither are the majority of high school graduates.

According to Socrates, “Education is defined as the process of inviting truth and possibility of encouraging and giving time to discovery.” A grand fall is yet to come as the onset of results will bring arrogance as well. And as history has it, the cosmos has taught every arrogant a lesson one way or another.

The saying, “Everything comes with a price,” deems fit here as the educational sphere has become a mere business. Schools promoting the number of students who scored above 90 in science – quantity over quality indeed! A child transformed into a calculator, storing bookish knowledge in the CPU – definitely cannot be classified as intelligence. Further, several schools charging exorbitant fee for transforming a human being into a fully functioning robot. Sadly, the criteria for college admissions are mere numbers and the capacity to retain an entire textbook.

As worked up as I was in the end of class 10, here I am again. Oblivious of what is to come, maybe, I’ll go along with what my parents want, or what is suited for my percentage. Well, as a child of the millennium, I’ll just roll with it because years of education induced the rules and seized me from having a mind of my own.

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Aishwarya S. Shastri is a student and has just cleared her class XII exams. Read her other articles here 

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