Patricia Mukhim
No sane person will deny their children access to education, no matter how poor the person is. But the fact is that poverty has made education inaccessible to many, despite the Right to Education Act. There are still thousands of kids that are out of school and doing menial jobs. With just one parent having to feed many mouths, education is beyond their grasp. And I dare say that the numbers of such children and teenagers who yearn to be in school but whose family circumstances are so precarious are growing every year. If these kids are asked why they want to go to school, the immediate answer is that they want to learn to read and write; to get out of the poverty trap and to be able to hold a job and better their stations in life. It is a failure of the state that there are still so many children out of school and of those who do have the good fortune to be in school, many just drop out before they pass high school. They are termed “drop-outs” which I think is a very disparaging term. The politically correct word for them would be, “out of school” children. Needless to say, teenagers who drop out of Class VII, VIII, IX or who fail their SSLC exams soon become the dregs of society because our system has not developed the capacity to address their specific handicaps. Yes, the state has come up with skills training but many don’t fit into those modules because these ‘out of school’ youth are ‘out of school’ for a reason or several reasons and there are not enough safety nets which can capture them and work on their psyche, for, that is where the problem starts.
Let’s face one fact. No single child is like the other one. Yet our schools are modelled to produce an assembly line of pass-outs who are tested on a single format and where creativity is not given any space at all. When I look at children today they seem to carry a heavy burden. The syllabus is huge; they all seem to need private tuitions in Mathematics and Science and they have absolutely no time to play and sweat it out. They are addicted to their mobile phones and they are perpetually with their head phones on. Half the time they don’t hear when you call them or are talking to them. They live in a world of their own which is like an escape mechanism because they find school to be an echo chamber. It’s almost as if the mobile phone with its humungous range of apps offers them the comfort that the real world cannot. So where have we reached at this point in our history?
We are told that young people engage in virtual romance and are depressed when they break up. Yes, this and other issues are what we hear and discuss as adults and as parents but when it comes to finding solutions we don’t seem to have any. They are out of reach because we need psychiatrists and counselling psychologists but have too few of them, even as mental illness has burgeoned and mainly because of internet addiction.
In this scenario, what education are children actually imbibing? Many say they find school and college boring because students these days know more than their teachers. Also, because teachers are not able to keep pace with the rapid technological progress of the present generation. Indeed technology is king and we are all trying to fit. This is a progress with no known trajectory. Since most young people live in a world of their own and they no longer accept do’s and don’ts from grown- ups be they parents or teachers, they are also alienated from the social life that actually enriched the experiences of their parents and elders.
Today there are enough WhatsApp forwards that tell us on a daily basis what is wrong with the world; with us; with our young ones. There are also enough sages and psychologists to advice us on what we should and should not be doing vis-a-vis our troubled kids but at the end of the day there really is no, “Do It Yourself (DIY) kit for handling children and young people. They need so much patience which busy parents of today just don’t have enough of.
It is in this complex environment that most young parents are bringing up their kids. It’s a daunting feeling to even answer their pointed questions. Kids today don’t believe in beating around the bush. They are direct and they don’t care if you hurt. I sometimes feel there is an emotion deficit in most of them, perhaps because they are more connected to gadgets than to humans. Many of them ask Alexa (the AI that is perhaps most affordable) for answers to difficult questions so why would they need their parents? Of course, Alexa is not supposed to know the state of mind of the person asking the question, but parents know and they can sense when their child is hurting or grappling with an emotional storm. That’s the big difference and one hopes that parents understand that and don’t allow Alexa to hijack their kids.
And now we are in the season of admissions into Higher Secondary schools and colleges. Those in Class XII are preparing to welcome freshers in their midst. Before they know it these students would have passed Class XII to move on to undergraduate colleges and as is the norm here many will waddle their way into University. Whether these students actually know what they want from life is anyone’s guess. To date most schools, especially in the rural areas do not have career counselling sessions that should begin in Class VIII –X when the child’s aptitude can be gauged. Hence many kids still decide for themselves or allow their parents to decide their future course of studies and even to plan their careers. Some parents have this neatly sorted out and expect their kids to simply fall in place. The problem arises if at some point the kid realises he/she is not cut out for that course of study and decides to opt out. Is there an easy exit route without the melodrama of, “ Oh how can you do this when we have invested so much on your studies and you have wasted so many years?” One can understand the anguish of parents but isn’t the future of the kid more important? Isn’t it more judicious for the kid to find out where he/she fits, even if it is dropping out of the Science stream to study music? Is that so appalling? It is appalling because our mindsets are so tunnelled and constricted and because we have not really understood the meaning of “liberal education.” In fact liberal education is what’s needed for the 21st century. Not everyone is going to be an Einstein or a medical genius or an outstanding architect. Each person has his/her own strengths and aptitude and should be allowed to excel in that. But for that to happen, parents have to be willing to shift their goalpost and better still to allow their children to put up their own goalposts.
Other than university education there are any number of professional courses that can provide better jobs than a nondescript Master’s degree. It ‘s important to seek out these professional courses that the current job market demands than to waste a University seat merely because the state subsidises University education in India. I am always dismayed by the fact that we have produced thousands of University scholars but we don’t hear them holding a view on any contemporary issue. They neither question nor dissent but readily join the crowd. What a waste of a University education.
On this note let me rest my pen here and share some more thoughts on education at a later stage.