This is a great question that stands posed before humanity at large—’What should education mean. The mistaken view that most parents and most of the young have about education is that it is just a means for livelihood — a means to equip for a career or for a profession.
True it is to a certain extent that more and more professionalism is gaining ground among teachers as well as among students and education is considered to be just a means and not an end itself.
In this world of hectic activity all around; of life torn within with competition and competence, the young mind is left with no option but to think of entering a course of education only for the sake of earning a decent living and lead a high profile life, if one can.
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Those who fail to make to this high-up in life have to feel contented with something lesser — but should be with a job all right. So job- seeking has become the be-all and ends all of all educational activity, at least, in our country.
Still, inspire of all this, the system of education and the lack of opportunities for employment leave hundreds and thousands, even laks in the line of the unemployed and frustrated lot.
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Education seems to be meaningless for them. That is why we find students in our country keeping beguiling themselves, and their guardians by continuing to remain enrolled as students in one course of study after another only to postpone the evil day of living up with the unemployed lot.
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Such ones turn out to become student-leaders trying to elicit patronage from this political party or that.
Only recently when the U.P- government passed an ordinance debarring students beyond the age of twenty five from contesting the students’ Union elections, there was such a hue and cry and such an agitation raked up by such professional students that the government was forced to roll back the ordinance.
Such so-called students pass the precious half of their life remaining in the University Campus on one pretext or the other and pretending to be still pursuing courses of education — which education has hardly any meaning for them worth the name.
So the question does knock at our doors to ask us, ‘what education actually means and what should it actually do with the young mind?
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We should accept the reality that education should be such as to equip our young men and women with the qualification and the competence to earn a respectable living. But a respectable living does not only mean a fat salary and a lavish life style — it means something more and something beyond it too.
Living a lavish life style is the ambition and the craving of every young mind but should one live that way in the manner as a Retired Wing Commander so much recently in the news has been living along with his daughter.
An educated man with a distinguished record of service, he was still lured away to indulge in such nefarious activities as drug-peddling and kickbacks in arms dealings.
And are not all our so- called leaders who have been accused of being involved in scams to the tune of crores, duly educated? Some of them are really learned and are authors of books. They are high up among the educated ones. They have been top-leaders of their party; have held high posts and Positions but all their education and erudition has gone waste on them. They, by their shady deals, have besmeared the name of the educated class. Could education — the highest one received by them — teach them the right way of life and conduct? That education could not and it can be said that education on them went waste.
The Dalai Lama while delivering the valedictory address at the conference ‘Education in the South Asian Context: Issues and Challenges’ organised by the Education department of the Delhi University said and very rightly did he say it that ‘Education must go together with basic human values and teachers must set an example for their students through action and deeds, not merely by words. He further elaborated on this point by saying there is too much stress on developing the mind and too little on developing a ‘warm heart’.
Actually what he meant by saying was that education should be used to bring more happiness and meaning into life, to narrow the gap between perception and reality. Such education with basic human values will be constructive and beneficial for the society.
There is need to develop a sense of caring for one another, a sense of belonging to the community, a sense of respect for each other, the more compassionate you are, the healthier is your mind.
This is what education really needs to do and that is what real education is ‘Sa Vidya ya Vimuktaye’ — that is ‘education which liberates’. The mind should be freed from the shackles of bigotry, from mere ritualism, from false pretences of religiosity.
By just relying on information provided by teachers and books and not individually investigating our knowledge becomes life a tape-recorder — we should rather utilise our own potential of freely thinking on issues and problems.
All this may apparently sound as just an idealistic talk but the fact of facts is that wherever we are, in whatever profession or vocation we may be functioning, these basic values shall ever help in leading a life which would be a worthy one.
There would be a sense of fulfillment and achievement; a sense of self-satisfaction that would make us feels elevated and elite in the real sense of the word. This is the real purpose of education and this is what education must do.