Educated People

“He/she looks like an educated person. How can he/she do that?” This is a phrase that I hear often, from a variety of people, in response to a variety of stupid or uncivil behaviour that people exhibit in everyday life. It is almost always delivered with an expression of disbelief. 

Quite honestly, I have never understood this strange correlation (in people’s mind) between being “educated” and the expectation of better behaviour from other human beings. It seems that for whatever reason, people believe that education is supposed to instil better sense and behaviour. It is supposed to make one a better human being. How? By attending Moral Science classes in school?

It is my firm belief that our education system is deeply entrenched in an industrial process of converting human beings into employable zombies who will obey orders. The standard recipe of study hard, good grades, good college, good job, etc. is designed to make us subservient and obedient. The sole aim of the design of this system is to ensure that one learns to never ask “why”. If you do not question, you will follow orders. If you do not question, you will never rebel. If you do not question, you will be an ideal brick in the wall.

In all of this training to become employable, where is the time to become a better human being? One learns that there are so many people fighting for the limited seats or resources or jobs that if one does not get into the system and snatch it, they will never get anything. This is another characteristic of human life as it is today. One needs to grab what one wants by any means otherwise someone else will.

Today, the biggest USP of an educational institution is its placement capability. Little do aspiring students understand how easy it is to manipulate placement numbers not to forget that there is no mechanism of even verifying if the institute’s claim is true. Ironically, as more and more people realise how profitable the business of education is, the number of institutions has shot up and the quality of education has dropped down.

In a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson titled “Do schools kill creativity?” (http://bit.ly/2JGsqeZ), he talks about how our education system suppresses our creative instincts and tries to fit everyone in the same, standard mould. I firmly agree with him that the business of education is about producing employable human beings. However, most institutions fail even at that.

We need to nurture intelligence instead of rote learning. We need to shift the focus from unimaginative and safe curriculum to one that encourages creative thinking, and inquisitiveness thus empowering children and adults alike, to question the world around them. The world today needs more creative human beings in all spheres of life than ever before to address the challenges that we face.

source: http://bit.ly/2D2V88m