Monday, June 2, 2008

the future of our country

Computer – read the name of the subject and I was staring at the name in absolute wonder. This was one of the subjects my cousin had to learn. Now learning about computers is definitely good but to thrust in into the minds of children at the tender age of five – that definitely can’t be good. Agreed, our’s is a land of computer prodigies. We can boast of children who can send e-mails at the age of 5 but then, to want every child of 5 to learn computers would be madness. My cousin could hardly pronounce the word computer and now she has to memorize all the accessories associated with computer as well. She is being taught that the CPU is the brain of the computer when her own brain can hardly comprehend the very function of the organ brain. Every day she has to carry more than a dozen load of books. She bears all the pain in silence unable to lent voice to the aching cry of her shoulders. What crime has she committed so as to be punished like this?
School, she is taught is the place where children go to learn. And good children always get good marks. Right form the start, a child is poisoned with this thought. Now, when she can hardly understand what keyboard and CPU is, all she can do to score marks is memorize the answers in her book through constant repetition. Her teacher tells her to write and learn and feeds her with pages of homework so as to assist her to do the same. As a child grows big, he/she carries with him/her this draconian trait which they were forced to acquire – that of memorizing answers with little understanding.
Now, this is a classic example of nurturing a system with ingrained evil and then running pillar to post to devise ways to fight the same evil. Well… to be honest, nobody is worried about it. The usual attitude is – I did it and so can my child.
It doesn’t make any sense to study in school now. Think about it- how much do you remember of your primary and secondary classes apart from the fact that you had exams regularly and your parents did want marks on the paper.
True, we do have private schools coming up now which focusses on other aspects of a child’s development, but what about the vast majority who are forced to depend on the rotten system? They say indian students are smart but you don’t see many indian names when it comes to research. Now, don’t raise a hue and cry saying NASA has 40 % indians and intel has so much % indians. They all do then why can’t NASA and intel be in india???
And a nation of a billion has yet to make its mark in the olympics. Football is still a far cry and a mere look at our national game in enough to give us a picture of sport. It’s not about sport or research. It’s about the career options of youth today. It’s about the future of our nation. It’s about us.
The biggest resource of any community would be it’s people and the children are the future and just look at the way we are shaping our future.
Come exam time, and you see news channel doing all sorts of analysis of various schools and colleges. And what do they show us? Statistics… Of what – of marks, of ranks, of percentages passed and of decimals cleared.Its’ like the entire education process is reduced to number crunching. Nothing else seems to matter.
Aint it time to change?? Shouldn’t we be more worried about our education??
Isnt’ it time for a revolution?? Energy, food all will fall into pieces if we can produce people fit enough to handle such issues.

4 comments:

-=A.R.N.=- said...

This is one main reason I hate the education in our country....I'm sure even the school teacher doesn't know what a CPU does, except that she gives full marks to the kid with the right spelling and a ton of homework to the one without.

And this goes on till engineering:D

Anonymous said...

wait didnt I learn logo in the 2nd grade..reminds me of those wonder years.I used to nurture the same kind of stream of thoughts and realized that I couldnt find a way to fix it so I joined the local nature club at the company.:P

Unknown said...

@rahman
Seriously noor... This is one place where we've gone completely wrong...
And like you said,engineering becomes a mere extension of school...
Hope this will change one day... guess there is a small realization coming along :)

Unknown said...

@going solo
Well... i guess thats' the only way out...