on education

much has been talked and written about the declining standard of the education in the u.s. but nothing about the larger side of it, the students' side. all talk is about fixing the school system that treats children like wild horses that need to be broken to be put to use. horses have no say, nor have children any say whether they would want to continue living like their subdued parents, who, like broken horses and elephants then help their captors to capture and break other free animals.

“it is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” -- albert einstein. his secondary school education was abruptly interrupted when he was 16. he was looking for ways to get out of school. so, too, all intelligent men from buddha down to modern times did not excel in anything academic. 16 seems to be the age of threshold between the adolescence and the adulthood, in school time, the 10th grade. so even before i knew them by names, i, too, had begun to wonder about the nature and the nature of culture in the rural india bordering the gir forest where lions roared early mornings and evenings, may be, communicating with the lions captured and caged, about a mile from the cage-like row of one room railway quarters provided to my father for the work for paycheck.



the creatures of the wild are called free, unlike the captive and domesticated animals. freedom is synonymous with the living in nature. culture -- cult+ure -- is a strong man's will (father knows best) imposed upon people treated like children by the "founding fathers" of nations. a nation is nothing but a large homestead for an extended family living as the grand patriarch spelled out (in constitution). currently we have some 184 such homesteads, and as in the hollywood version of feuds between the neighbouring homesteads, these nation-steads constantly keep quarrelling to expand their territories, the water rights and the grazing grounds and the rest of it.



when the spread of the household became too large and management too big for one person, grudgingly, the head of the household assigned the duties to the other members. and this spelling out of the duties formed the syllabus of the first school. just look at the course offerings. even the so called pure sciences have commercial aspects, the applied science for which students enroll.

society is tradition bound. and the tradition is what is handed down from father to son. so the society creates the school after itself, and the school perpetuates the society. anything that changes is due to the conflict between the nature of things as it is and what the society tries to modify it to keep it moving away from the desired format. when children come of age, they begin to experience the difference between what they see and what they are told and taught it to be. so did it happen to me in the 10 grade. and a few years earlier at my priestly brahmana father's home. after having to allow the village's only "bone doctor", who was an "untouchable" man to fix my dislocated shoulder, my father asked me to take the "purification bath". having experienced nothing impure in the elderly doctor's rather healing touch, i objected. since then i have been observing the conflict between the young and old, in which the young denotes the growth, the change, and hence the desire to break loose; and the old represents the resentment to their own veining powers to keep all the sheep within the fold. thus when my language teacher asked the class to write an essay on: "if i were a prime minister", i wrote: 'if i were a prime minister, i would ask the education minister to tell all teachers not to ask the students to write such an essay, but instead, write to the prime minister regarding what the students want done or done differently'. my language teacher disapproved of my writing, i told him, that he had asked me what i would do, and not what he would want us to write. i was in his class to learn about the structure of the language, not what to express. in the mathematics it was all the structure, without the relevance to why. the why part of the entire schooling, from grade to graduate school as it is, is to retain the prevalent way of life of the anglo-sexon society that enjoys the status quo in its favour in all walks of life except the ecologically biological nature of existence.

the darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest only creates the olympian race pitting everyone against each other in all walks of life, and tutored thus, the young, who had once shared the same bench in the classroom, and played together devoid of any notion of winning, then view their best friends as competitors vying for the scholarship, admission in the desired school, job, promotion, and esteem in others' eyes. in it lurks the fear of losing, and hence the desire to eliminate the potential threat, and not the weak. the weak are retained to do the menial work.

from the 10th grade on, all through the graduate school, and then as a teacher from the grade to graduate school, i have observed students experiencing the inborn instinct to break loose, evolve, and the academic institutions becoming corrals to hold them back. what seems worse is that, due to the modern means of communications like the internet, the children are as much informed, if not more, than their teachers regarding the subjects taught. what they do not know, and do not want to know is the form and format of many of the academic subjects that have no relevance to the modern living. the much of these skills becomes the matter for entertainment required to pacify the masses so that they do not rebel. not just religion is the opiate for the masses, anything that occupies the consciousness during the "off duty" hours of the middle class and the affluent, acts as the drug. incidentally, one of the first persons to observe that was the buddha, who stated: "i shall abstain from dance, singing, music and theatrical performances", which threatened the poet bhartrihari, who reacted: "a man without literature, music and the arts is an animal without tail."

the evolutionary process recognizes no national boundaries. so it was not that only the western schools were taking advantage of it. the 3rd world children's abilities were not known before. 2+2 makes 4 everywhere, whether in the u.s. school or in a one room school made of mud. what is not encouraged is to know what to do and not do with what is learnt, which makes the son quite unlike his father; the daughter unlike her mother in the evolutionary existence.