It is something so basic that questioning its significance is almost amusing.
Let’s say education did not exist. Education how we have it, going to school eight hours a day, five days a week, sitting through Moral Science lectures, spending another eight hours skipping tuition classes, writing 34872732 tests and then the climax – BOARDS! Say the aforementioned system did not exist. It takes me some thinking to imagine what it would be like. Delinquent, would be my immediate response, but upon further thinking, it makes me curious to picture what we are missing out on by teaching generation after generation the same old things invented and discovered in periods whose dates we find a task to remember.
What is education doing? It is making us aware. Sure. But I sense a feeling of curtailment. Education has perhaps curtailed our creativity, our human drive for innovation. There was no systemized education given to the man to invented the wheel. Which architecture school did the builders of Taj Mahal graduate from? The Rajputs had an elaborate system for water reservation and management in 1700 something.
If you are now all squinty-eyed and thinking that this girl is anti-education. I am not. I am all for education. But I am more for knowledge seeking, and in my personal experience we have forgotten that along the way of standardizing knowledge. School and university has become a check box we must tick.
Instinctive human activities are ones of creativity and newness. Our brains are naturally meant to engage in exercises of inventiveness, delving into the finer things of life, composing a poem, or dancing to a rhythmic tune. Our education is being dominated by teaching us how we must churn out money and live financially happy lives. (It is important, yes, but not at the cost of other things).
In educating, we think we are becoming human. What a lie we are living!
In the famous words of Benny Bellamacina, “You are only limited by your own imagination”.
But… What imagination?
Written by Radhika Sethi
