I was reading today’s Economic Times and article in the Education Times supplement caught my eye.
It spoke about the different kinds of bans Educational institutes enforced on their students. The surprising thing here is that these educational institutes were not schools but were graduate and post graduate level courses or as they refer to them in the US undergraduate and graduate level courses.
This article had an ending that provoked thought (and hence this article).
One of my favorite words in Hindi is ‘vivek’ which means the ability to discern good from bad, is not something one is born with rather something that comes with experience. Where else would we get this experience if not in school? And by enforcing rules for behavior, dress, interaction between sexes etc. with a fervor that would put puritans to shame we are systematically ensuring that this next generation that comes out of college, and into this real world with NO experience of making choices.
Why do I say that? School is a mini laboratory, a controlled environment where we can make choices, experience the results and understand the choices that get rewarded and the ones that get punished thus creating a model of how the world works.
A Strict enforcing of rules means – a student’s choice is made for him or her. Thus when they enter the real world, they do not have a internal model by which they can validate whether the choices they make are good or bad and that is the biggest failure of higher education – Great schooling but no education. I guess Mark Twain knew what he was saying when he said “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education“.
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