NEED TO SPREAD HUMANE VALUES IN SOCIETY THROUGH OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM (CATCH ‘EM YOUNG)

 

A lot of prominent sports personalities & life trainers have praised the Indian cricket team for their outstanding performances with vital, key observations being made about the life learnings to be had from the entire uplifting, gutsy showing by team members, both experienced & rookie. Learnings like never say die; don’t approach a situation with past mental baggage; believe in yourself; live in the moment & enjoy it; don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself; etc. etc. All of it ultimately building up to amazing victories & national pride.

 

However, there are other equally important learnings to be had from this amazing exhibition of raw guts & solid self-belief. That of the humane side of these heroes coming up the ranks whose origins are either rural or urban poor. A man who’s pillar of support, his father, passes away while he is abroad with the team. He returns victorious & heads straight to his father’s grave to pay his last respects. A father whose dream made it all possible for our young hero. The bond, gratitude, the appreciation is there for all of us to see. But is anyone learning anything from this simple, moving familial gesture or will it merely end trivialized by Bollywood sometime in the future. Another team mate who is blessed with a daughter who once again only gets to see her after 2 months on his victorious return. What lessons for teaching are our school teachers gathering from these awesome but simple turns that life throws at some amongst us. Yet another who tears a hamstring, takes an injection that numbs his right leg & then goes on to grind the opposition to dust. This cricket team of rookies has stories galore to inspire us. I’m sure our armed forces comprising mostly of simple rural folk have equally compelling life lessons for us. But we need our education system to sit up & take note of these instances & find imaginative inspiring ways to incorporate these learnings into the value systems of our young students at school & college levels. Not just as a one-off lecture or a stand-alone module but all through their student careers. The approach has to be dynamic where the system is alive & sensitive to pick up on such stories that are happening all around us all the time. 

 

It is time to junk the urban/rural divide. Given the right opportunities anyone can excel & India is incredibly rich in talent. And if the urban consider themselves as urbane, privileged & blessed then instead of looking down on our rural compatriots, the onus is on them to make the effort to see that all opportunities percolate down to the rural masses. For what the rural may lack in terms of sophisticated education & polish, they more than make up for with their robustness & honest, baggage free approach. The energy, vitality & drive to perform burns hot in their bellies.

 

There is another divide that needs to be junked. That of the haves & have nots. Once again young India has amply proved in recent times that there is no direct correlation between economic levels & performance & outcome. A point to be noted by serious educationists that the deprived bring more values to the table. Despite all the quality education being imparted to the well-heeled, urban youngster, there is a visible lack of moral & humane values that they exhibit in real life. In fact, the city kid today is typically selfish & jaded. “Me first”. “It’s all about me”. “Win at all cost. Right or wrong. Good or bad”. Pressure to perform, peer pressure, parental pressure, pressures of survival, all add up to make “well” educated city kids lose sight of the “path”. The end justifies the means, becomes the only mantra. Yes, the dreams are there. The creativity, the drive & the clarity of thought. But the methods adopted most times leaves a lot to be desired.

 

So where is the education system going wrong? No point blaming circumstances & surroundings. The poor rural kid also has his unique challenges but still continues to possess basic human values in life’s struggles.  Values like appreciating support systems like family, friends, mentors, coaches, etc. Yes, they may be rough & ready, crude, very basic in their behaviour but the gratitude, the appreciation as well as, the mindset to help deprived others like themselves is also very visible. 

 

Maybe, city educationists could spend some time observing, investigating & researching rural lifestyles. Possibly there are life lessons to be learnt from such an exercise that then could be incorporated into their syllabus & teachings.

 

As per pre-pandemic figures available there are 10,83,678 government schools in India, 84,614 aided schools & 3,25,760 private schools. As per the Education Ministry, 65.2% of all school students go to government schools. 27 million children go to aided schools & 83 million to private. Nearly 4,00,000 schools have less than 50 students & a majority of schools have a maximum of 2 teachers per school. In reality, there is about a 1:100 teacher-student ratio in most schools. What makes it even more complicated is the multiple age & learning levels in one class. Around 115 million children in India study in such unviable schools. It is therefore, no surprise that the dropout of children from schools is one of the highest in the world – at nearly 75%. It is not necessarily distance from home, lack of toilets, lack of computers, etc., but intangibles like sense of well-being, motivation, self-esteem & confidence that play a significant role in the children continuing education.

 

In India, trauma & psychotherapy are usually associated with the stigma of failure & weakness. It is also associated with extreme factors like witnessing suicide or being a victim of both sexual, physical or extreme verbal abuse. Founders of vocational institutes must recognize that students enrolling would likely be dropouts from such deprived schools & unsettled family backgrounds. Therefore, it is suggested that institutes dealing with deprived children from urban slum communities or the rural poor  should aspire to be recognized as Trauma-Sensitive institutes to give the trainees a wholesome, joyful learning experience in an environment that not only helps them survive but thrive.

 

 There is a lot of chatter these days of assignment & project-based learning vis-à-vis the conventional methods of classroom lectures & rote learning. In the former approach there is early identification of a young person’s natural talents which are then nurtured & encouraged through this method, so much so that students are also encouraged to intern in related industries in as early a stage as middle school to ignite the related passions & fires. Maybe, the assignment/project-based learning methods could also incorporate a national/domestic rural/urban exchange programme, like the student exchange programmes between countries. It would benefit both sides of the divide to see each other’s strengths & deficiencies at close quarters. Hopefully a wider understanding of the diverse nature of life & its opportunities or lack of, will not only lead to a better understanding but could dramatically improve human values that are fast eroding.

 

I’m not sure how aware our conventional educationists are about the future of society at large where BIG TECH worldwide is pushing hard for highly physically invasive Artificial Intelligence (AI) to completely regulate our lives. We have already seen that the march of science & technology is inevitable. Therefore, it is imperative to put back the focus, creating an avenue to bring in novel & creative ways to enhance humane values in the education of our young for a better world tomorrow.