THE NEW EDUCATION POLICY -- A SECONDARY LEVEL TEACHER'S PERSPECTIVE OR A LAYMAN'S VIEW

THE NEW EDUCATION POLICY -- A SECONDARY LEVEL TEACHER'S PERSPECTIVE OR A LAYMAN'S VIEW

CHARACTER, THE CALL OF THE HOUR

Buildings are not universities, neither policies academic output. What is needed is character in men who are at the helm of affairs, beginning from the Prime Minister, men who are in charge of the proper implementation of the policies, so that the right results are derived. It is then the duty of the citizens to avail of the afforded opportunity and produce the desired results to bolster the academic strength of the nation.

KEEP POLITICS OUT OF UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES

But politics is the pernicious evil that has to be kept out of the university campuses. It is no good saying that ant-national activities are conducted there while politicians themselves indulge in rampant subversion of the system themselves. This attempting to gain control of the university students after gaining political power is at the root of all the evils that pollute academia today. Therefore, unless politics be debarred from university campuses, there is no hope of India ever arriving on the world scene in academics despite the tallest of pretensions and the boldest of declarations by the political dispensation of the day. All this is frothy falsity indulged in by deluded individuals who themselves have never been students of any merit and are now intent upon doing what they cared not to do when they had their chances in their own student lives. Hence, all these policies are bound to fail eventually till a decent polity throws up men of character to govern the nation.

MERITOCRACY, THE NEED

The cultural scene in India is on a precipitous decline as men of little talent or quality are increasingly filling up the public sphere and degrading the existing system to abysmal levels. When these ignoramuses shout at the top of their voices about a proposed renaissance of Indian culture, a culture to which they have no clue themselves, one shudders to think what we have in store for us in the near and the remote future.

CURTAILED SYLLABUS AND RAISED MARKING

Over the last decade and a half there has been a serious erosion in academic standards all over India owing to wrong education policies where secondary level students are increasingly being given lighter syllabus. Also, chop-and-change policy has added to complications. The syllabus is so curtailed and marks are given so high that secondary level results in the Board Examinations have become a mockery of all that academic quality stands for. The result has been a proliferation of graduates with little or no learning. This must change right from the base if India is to attain her academic goals in the foreseeable future.

PARENTAL ROLE

Citizens also have a role to play in this regard. Parents today are grossly negligent of their children's studies and do not much care for providing them with a decent atmosphere where they can pursue their studies with concentration and care. Parents are more concerned with socialising than with sitting with their children at or near their study tables to oversee that they work. Rather, they are busy disturbing them unduly with loud telephone talk with friends and relatives which makes both teaching and studying unduly difficult. Such selfishness is often witnessed in modern mothers and is a sad departure from what it used to be in our times. If parents do not facilitate study at home, children, despite they being provided with the best of study material and tutors, will not study properly. Parents who sacrifice their present pleasures for their children receive the prize of performing pupils in their children and in successful working lives when they mature into adulthood.

CHILDREN'S ROLE

Children also have a like role to play. An insincere child will never prosper in studies. 'Morning shows the day' -- my father used to say to me when I was a child and an exceedingly sincere student at that. Yes, those who are insincere in the dawn of their lives will grow up to become these corrupt politicians and businessmen proposing programmes of India's development which are as hollow as their own debased characters. So, insincerity somehow has to be rooted out at the base and here teachers come in with a tremendous responsibility in the discharge of their duties.

TEACHER'S ROLE

Teachers are the architects of a country's destiny in many ways. They provide the information that goes to build up the knowledge bank of a generation to begin with before self-discovery of facts and principles are taken up by advanced students who in turn pass on such information to the next generation. But mere information does not make a man. It is idealism, character and the glowing life of a teacher that make the biggest impression on the student-mind and fosters all that is worthwhile in the developing soul. If teachers are possessed of a fiery idealism that infectious spreads on to students, than they are a tremendous force for good. Such teachers are growing scarce by the day owing to proliferating capitalist-consumerist culture where money and its ilk are dampening the powder in the pupil and the preceptor alike. We need idealistic and upright teachers, untainted by greed of money or lust for position, unfettered and free, men and women who can fire up young minds with the sole aspiration to dedicate their lives for the service of the motherland.

THE RUSH FOR GOING ABROAD

Today, parents, preceptors and pupils are all fuelled in their dreams and their deeds by the desire to go abroad to pursue higher studies. This is a shame but it remains a reality, nonetheless. Higher education in India has been reduced to a farce by the influx of an overmuch of politics. When politicians are mostly illiterate or semi-literate, we cannot expect much more from the system and have to endure it till a better polity evolves out of the current corruption. Till then we have to make individual efforts to contribute to the academic system either from within it formally or from without in any manner that we can. After all, individual effort has been often inordinately productive and cannot be disregarded as of being of little consequence.

MONASTIC'S ROLE

A final word and this is addressed to the monastics who are revered in the country but do not feel it necessary to voice their views powerfully in the manner Swami Vivekananda used to. There is a terrible vacuum today in the world of spiritual idealism as hardly any monk can inspire the youth. Only fraudulent Gurus rule the roost with the political nod empowering them further in their dirty designs of misleading the polity along lines of superstition. Be it a 'Miracle Baba' or a 'Bad Guru' or a 'Double Shree', all these people have and are milking the gullible masses with connivance with politicians and businessmen. That the good spiritual organisations choose to ignore their perfidious designs at national debilitation for personal gains, is regrettable. A country where spirituality is so on the decline that corruption flourishes in the name of religion and spirituality, cannot improve its education system, for the men at the top are rotten to the core and the masses at the base rotting in consequence.

GO BACK TO VIVEKANANDA

The problems are manifold but the solution is one. Go back to Vivekananda, monk or man, and stop this mockery of pretentious announcement of programmes before making fundamental adjustments to your character.

Written by Sugata Bose