My Thoughts On Education

My clearest thoughts are formed in my sleepiest hours. When my mind is on that narrow edge between consciousness and the lack of it, suspended there on the bank of that fall, in a state of vapor, it thinks, unhindered by material encumbrances and distractions. There it breathes purely in the air of wisdom and knowledge. In those moments the experiences that have accumulated in the little nooks and recesses of my mind unknowingly each day, every hour through the humdrum of daily life, come rushing in, summoned by the power of thought with great alacrity and everything read is molded and fused and combined with everything lived, each thought enriching another, borrowing a little from here and a little from there, and in moments as these, I form my truths. There in those precious moments my mind distills gold from the sand and the debris of pollution. Of everything that was taught in school rooms, those wasteful hours of cramming from books and striving great energy in vomiting out useless information, when instead the energy could have been so much better employed in seeking out and relishing the wisdom that lay in those very school rooms, but behind the wood paneled doors of the library, access to which was denied to students. When the hour of pure reading was devoted to a mere an hour a week! How many potentially great minds, who would have walked through the gates of my school as children, might have been snuffed out by this education. We appreciate and worship mediocrity in our country, we admire the empty vessels that clang and clamor and make loud noise and we encourage such show and pomp in our children, but of great minds that could have been, we take every care that indifference can afford, to let wither and die.

What education was that which never introduced me to the classic writers, let alone philosophy. If only I knew what Emerson was in those formative days of teenage. Or if I had even read a bit of Plato's republic. Stray glimpses of real worth I found in between the English textbooks - a Wordsworth here, a Keats there, some excerpts of Khalil Gibran, some abridged classics, a mention of Shakespeare - what education was it that never acted a Shakespeare but endured countless worthless hours of memorizing names and dates on early feverish mornings before examinations.

The only education that I remain thankful for from my school days, I must owe to my classmates and the interactions between them - in classrooms and even more in the playground and during the lunch hours  - for it taught me valuable lessons of friendship, cruel but nevertheless useful.  It showed me how base and thoughtless our actions even as kids can be, how inflicting cruelty comes natural to us, how love and gentleness and kindness have to be learnt by example and practiced. Through select teachers who may have done no good to me by teaching the content of those worthless books but have enriched my spirit and soul by their wisdom and kindness and encouragement, to those teachers who have inspired me to look for education beyond the classroom, who taught me to write and express and to those teachers - who have by their favoritism, indifference and often even cruelty to the tender minds of their young pupils inflicted by looks and words have taught me what not to be as a human - I remain eternally indebted.

I propose a new system of education that so often must have been proposed by those countless others who in later walks of life have discovered all that they have missed, whose eyes when opened to the truth and when realization awakened their reason, might have then looked back and screamed and cried at the waste of their childhood days in the name of education. Let us not force children to cram content on content - of facts and dates and waste splendid nights on writing down formulas and beautiful mornings on revisions and make them shiver at the fear of examinations but instead let them be taught to read and appreciate and above all to think for themselves and to do rather than to merely know. To grow rather than memorize, because real education is growth, it is the growth of your soul, out of the obscurity of ignorance and falsehoods into the light of truth and freedom.