The Education Conundrum

There have been a great many debates about the purpose of education, and its relevance, in today's world. Education as we see it in conventional schools and colleges in the western world and in those nations elsewhere where the western style of education has found root. Like in India, for instance. A system loved and encouraged by most upwardly mobile families the world over.

Martin Luther King said that the purpose of education should be moral and not just utilitarian. He said, "To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction." How true! There are many other scholars, philosophers, thinkers who have warned about the dangers that declining standards of education can have on society, and indeed the world at large. The struggle to save this planet from destruction is basically a fight against a kind of thinking (influenced by a certain kind of education) that has caused/still causing the mess in the first place.

Sadly education has been reduced wholly to ONLY satisfy a practical need. Which is to gain economic prosperity and to do little else. This bull-in-a-china-shop approach towards gaining wealth that modern man seems to have has ensured we are already paying the price for going down the wrong road for the last couple of hundred or so years. Probably from around the time of industrial revolution. Yes, there were many benefits as a result of industrialization, but unfortunately man's arrogance led to hitherto unexpected levels of exploitation of the planet by force that he now had gained. I talked briefly about the role of religion in this in one of my earlier blogs.

Most academic institutions today seem to be successful only in mass-producing low-thinking, selfish, mind-numbed individuals incapable of having any foresight or vision. To have a vision for the future one has to be a leader. To produce leaders we need education that, like Martin Luther King said, should be both utilitarian and moral. One that will build character and culture. One that will lead not to just knowledge and intelligence, but to Wisdom. So there.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, "A nation must have leaders, men who have the power to see a little farther, to imagine a little better life than the present. But if this vision is to be fulfilled, it must also have a vast army of men and women capable of understanding and following these leaders intelligently. These citizens must understand their government from the smallest election district to the highest administrative office. It must be no closed book to them, and each one must carry his own particular responsibility or the whole army will lag."

This is without doubt most relevant for all of us who continually lament about the quality of politicians we end up electing and yet choose to send our children through a system of education that excels in producing precisely those kind of individuals.

Good culture is a result of good education and good values. Good culture protects and heals all that is considered sacred, and in turn automatically protects the world around it. Something that ancient cultures were extremely successful with; a legacy that is getting rapidly eroded by us today.


(Click here to read a brilliant speech on the same subject by David Orr, an environmental educator in 1990!)

Balkanization of India?

Gandhi was a remarkable man, a truly once-in-millennium human being. I say so, not because he led a successful freedom struggle against the British, but for uniting a totally disparate group of people who live in this land we call India, a land with such unparallelled diversity of cultures, customs, races, languages.

Yeah well, we have all read this in history books alright. But the above fact has never hit me as hard as it has in the recent months. Have no idea exactly why, but maybe I can blame it on a heightened level of awareness (that I hitherto did not possess) in perceiving what's going on in this country.

The concept of India as a nation cannot have happened but for Gandhi, because it must have been an audacious thought to even imagine such a diverse bunch of people could decide to be citizens of the same country! It was his legacy (and a few of his followers') that India managed to stay as one nation, although one could see cracks developing on the walls all these years.

Today, in 2008, one just has to survey the political scene in this country to see how fragmented things have become. The last decade or so, has shown that the days of the single-party rule is over and smaller and smaller groups have started wielding power. The rise of regional parties with distinctly regional interests such as the BSP, the SP, the Telugu Desam, the BJD, the PMK etc., have shown that the national identity is fast being replaced by a regional one. And the regional identities are getting smaller and smaller as has been shown by groups such as TRS in Andhra Pradesh that is demanding a separate statehood for the region.

Could this be the start of the balkanization of India? A few years earlier, I would have laughed if someone had ventured to suggest the idea that India, on the cusp of an unparalleled economic boom, faced a threat to it sovereignty. But today am not so sure. Heck, it is scary to think that this might even happen in my lifetime!

When the two of major news headlines I read today happened to be about...
a) the shameless overtures made by the UPA and the NDA to criminals and
b) the communist party's senior leader proclaiming Mayawati as a possible future PM if the UPA government falls
....I have a empty feeling in my stomach.

It is too easy to blame our politicians for the mess like so many of us do simply because we just hate being accountable. It's easier to have a bogeyman, a whipping boy, to fix the blame on and go on living our lives showing just the right amount of self-righteousness and indignation whenever it is required socially. The rot is too deep and the blame lies on all of us who have chosen to each time put self over the nation and think it is somebody else's job to govern and rule.

The wrong kind of people get to the top in politics because they are allowed to by an electorate that is either ignorant or ill-informed or selfishly-motivated and narrow-minded. When a society elects its leaders for all the wrong reasons, what hope can there be for its survival.

When there is rotting carcass for dinner, expect the vultures not butterflies.

What was that again?

I read this news item on Yahoo! this morning - "Pope calls on religions to unite against terrorism" - with a feeling, I can only describe as incredulity.

How does the head of one of the world's largest religions - one that is built around a central belief that it is superior to all other religions and whose practitioners are led to believe that "the Christian way is the only way to God" - hope to "unite" religions??

One would think that someone who goes by the title "the Holy Father", would have the wisdom to realise that you can't unite people by rhetoric alone. Till the Church (or indeed, any other similar religious body) starts practicing inclusiveness and tolerance towards other faiths, it will remain just that!

Who, or what, created the Mess?

The planet's in a mess! Pollution, environmental degradation, global warming, ozone layer depletion....Most of us know this, but right now choose to look the other way and hope someone else will figure things out and clean up the mess. Hoping, maybe, Al Gore or some other messiah will save us from impending destruction!

Like many, many people who wonder about where the human race went wrong, I too have done my share of thinking. Like in the case of the most complex problems, the answer did not come straight away, but emerged like a scenery viewed through a fog. I must say, the picture is still not fully formed, but I think I am beginning to see it.

It's funny, but modern man (primarily from the western world) mocked, scoffed (continues to do so) at ancient, tribal cultures that existed all over the world for being "backward". The empowered western world, immediately after the industrial revolution, set about conquering, destroying, annhilating other nations culturally, socially, environmentally... This is true of all that happened in Africa, Australia and the rest of Oceania, the Americas and Asia. This much is common knowledge and everyone knows this.

My attempt here, is not to recount history, but to drive at what made these men behave the way they did - completely subjugate and destroy cultures, enslave people and most importantly plunder the natural resources of this planet, wipe out entire habitats and animals leaving behind a mess that nations/governments are struggling to deal with??? What kind of thinking results in such behaviour??

I tried coming up with some answers:

a. The western man was arrogant in belief that all other cultures, beliefs and religions were inferior to his own and therefore not worthy of respect.
b. His total lack of understanding of nature and the way it works! Something that most ancient, tribal cultures possessed. (After all these very same cultures did a very good job protecting the planet for thousands of years till the white man took over in the last couple of hundred years!)

And then I read this from the white man's Holy Book:
Genesis 1.26

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

and this...

Genesis 1.28

God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Rule over? Subdue? See the connection?

Need I say more???

No Country for Old Men

Wonder what has happened to film makers in Hollywood the last decade or so. Many of them seem to have become prisoners of an all-pervasive style of film-making that seems to be the norm these days. One that is over-stylized, pretentious and self-indulgent.

No Country for Old Men was a big disappointment! I loved one of Coen brothers earlier creation Fargo, so was curious to watch this movie. (Fargo had brilliant performers in William H. Macy and Frances McDormand; the latter winning a well-deserved academy award for her performance.) The movie has great cinematography - the desert-landscape captured beautifully - but that's about it.

The killer in No Country for Old Men roams around freely killing people at will - in motels, highways, practically everywhere usually blowing them with a bazooka-like gun and/or, what Wikipedia informs, is a captive bolt pistol (need to thank the Coen brothers for introducing the audience to this charming weapon of destruction!). No one sees him or reports him - he walks into a motel, guns down people and calmly walks out.

Another bounty hunter (Woody Harrelson) mysteriously tracks down the character played by Josh Brolin, but we are not told how. He also, on his own, zeroes in on the exact spot of the satchel containing money that the latter hurriedly throws near the U.S-Mexican border. How, we again do not know. The movie is full of such flaws and silly mistakes. The directors seem to have got so engrossed in the making a thriller where the main characters play a cat-and-mouse game, that they seem to have thrown common sense and logic out of the window.

Javier Bardem, has won an Oscar for best supporting actor for this performance which at least a hundred other actors in Hollywood could have sleep-walked through. He plays an unemotional, deep-voiced, malevolent killer with no special flair. And they denied Leonardo DiCaprio the same award for his wonderful performance in that wonderfully quirky movie What's Eating Gilbert Grape!

My idea of a good thriller is The Sleuth, a 1972 movie with Lawrence Olivier and Michael Caine. Brilliant performances by both actors, with edge-of-the-seat excitement without the blood and gore and excellent screenplay.

I wish Hollywood would stop this crazy obsession with style and technique and revert to good, solid film-making where the story and screenplay take precedence.

YMCA

Last Sunday morning I visited the YMCA complex. This sports complex in Nandanam, Chennai (Madras) was a real life-saver for us kids who grew up in the neighbourhood. Life in the 1970s and the early 1980s was a time was a TV-less, internet-less existence. Which meant we had to spend time playing outside.

The YMCA was (and still is) a sprawling campus with a sports college, a school and multiple grounds meant for different sports disciplines - football, track and field, hockey, cricket etc. To the south of the campus lies the lush green golf club belonging to the Cosmopolitan Club and to its east/south-east flows the Adyar river.

We hung around a lot, especially during summer holidays, on the banks of the river, chucking stones into it, climbing trees, trying to catch a lizard or try to catch some fish with improvised fishing "rods" (made up of a string and a bent safety pin with earthworms as bait!) from a nearby artificial pond! Didn't think much about cruelty to animals and stuff...But that apart, it was a wonderful time! At the risk of sounding cliched, it does seem a long time ago when life seemed, well, different.

I was so glad that very little has changed, although one can see that the place seems a little run-down and less vibrant, primarily because I didn't see many kids around.

The YMCA offers a membership (the parking attendant quoted some ridiculously low figure that I need to verify) to use its facilities. I intend taking up one so I can maintain the connection to this wonderful place that was such an important part of my childhood!

90 orbits around the sun

One of the great science fiction writers of our time and visionaries Arthur C. Clarke is dead, aged 90.

Growing up in the 1980s, when the genre of science fiction was a lot more popular than it is today, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury were some of the authors who were popular. Great books, ultimate fantasy and adventure that was space travel would transport me to a different realm. God, am I glad that I grew up at a time when television didn't dominate our lives!! Coincidentally, I am reading one of his books, The Garden of Rama, right now. And who can forget the magical 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I am glad Arthur C. Clarke lived long enough to see Richard Branson's brave attempt at space tourism. Check out, what is probably, his last video message on his birthday in Dec 2007.

Farewell space traveller and thanks for all the magic!