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Saturday, January 15, 2011

Why Revolutionize?


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As a kid, I loved hovering around trees. My mom advised me not to pluck leaves and flowers from tress at night. She told me that trees too need sleep.  At the age of 8, everybody in my class laughed at me, when I repeated my mom’s advice to my science teacher Ms Rita. When I was 3 years old, I colored an apple black. My teacher laughed when she saw my notebook. Later my brother  teased me about my ‘lack of common sense’. Guess what? When I was 14, I saw black apples, especially produced with extra iron content half way across the globe. Growing up, I did not play much with the kids in my locality. I didn’t read any  books except my course books and I didn’t watch enough TV. As a result, I scored very well in my exams including standing third in the city of Mumbai(Bombay). I  thought I knew a thing or two about the real world. But time would teach me better.

When I started interacting with the real world, I quickly realized my  lack of general knowledge and current affairs. What however was not so apparent was my lack of creativity, social skills and life skills. I did not relate well to people. I could not understand how things worked on my own. I needed to read about everything. My observation was poor. I simply didn’t know how to educate myself through experience and observation. I couldn’t deal with failure or the ability to dissect things down to their core.

Slowly it dawned on me what I had missed. If I had played enough, I would be able to get along with people, be healthier, sportier, and good at strategies and would also learn to deal with failure. If I had read enough fiction, I would be able to think of the unknown and the unheard, firing my imagination to the next level. If I had noticed how my mom makes butter or dusts the carpet, I would use science and not just learn it. If I had watched TV and read enough books and magazines, I would know how the real world works. I would know that wars have nothing to do with peace. I would know that foreign aid has nothing to do with aid. I would know that friendly relations between nations have nothing to do with friends.  At the age of 21, I understood what I had missed out on.

Don’t get me wrong though. I am proud of everything I got and everything that I chose to do with it. I am thankful for the very best in education that my parents provided me. But that is my problem – Is this was what the very best of education provides?. We can’t even comprehend what the very worst provides, where 1 in 3 teachers in governement schools have not gone to school for the past whole academic year. Our education needs reform.

VISIT educationrevolution.in for more details
Will be continued… :)

1 comment:

  1. Nice post. Education is a tricky thing. Everyone has an idea of what should be done depending on the goals that they have in mind. It is only pretty late in life, that one realizes that a lot of what was told to be important does not matter at all. Like what grade you got in school does not matter, nor does the number of books read or subjects studied. All that matters is what are the one or two things that you really learnt and made yours from it all.

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