Can Mediocrity Survive and Sustain
Do you think MEDIOCRITY CAN SURVIVE AND SUSTAIN in education system?
Meaning of Mediocrity
Mediocrity in education means an impaired learning, perceptual distortions, a lack of emotional differentiation and diminished curiosity as well as increasing inability to self understand and correct themselves and build a character.
Yes, mediocritywill survive and persist
It will survive and persist because the meaning of education may not be known.
The meaning of education is different from literacy,literacy implies ability to read and write and comprehend. Education is all about learning in values. Education is all about an increased ability and willingness to learn throughValues,Honesty, andEmpathy and its concurrent application.
Educationis notabout Rote learning,Educationis notabout Marks,Educationis not about Degrees, Educationis notabout Perception based opinion, Educationis notabout Being impetuous, Educationis notbeing arrogant, Educationis notabout being an Achiever, and Educationis neverabout Being judgmental.
In India too much importance is given to marks rather than to the process of learning and understanding the concept which makes the knowledge gained much more usable. Most of the students just mug up what is given in their textbooks without even understanding what they mean just for the sake of scoring marks. It is all about the marks scored, the total percentage obtained and which college the candidate wants to get into. In fact in India, the system for its most part shifts the attention from educating for knowledge to education for marks.
And to obtain marks, the longer the answer, that you write, the more marks you get. Memorizing is given more importance than understanding.The reservation system based on caste and religion and political influences has given way to so calledteachers who themselves do not understand the topic and teach for the sake of money and money only. Teaching is an intention of reforming the candidates, not an intention making money. Teaching can never be a job; it’s a service with an intent that is different from a job mentality and intent. A teachers job is not like a businessman or a trader and has to be glamourized in a different manner altogether. Unless the role of teacher is glamourized, there is no way that teaching will be picked up by the best of talents.
A journalist in an article on Indian film and refers Mumbai film industry as “Bollywood”, passes the same judgment on global warming as the west without his own logic and develops an ability to relate everything with global warming; He passes judgments no holds barred blowingArushi’s case out of proportion without applying his logic, accusing her father of all foul things. There are frequent conversations in day-to-day language that speaks of the judgmental mindset of people.Day by day we are becoming judgmental, we are imitating judgments, becoming cynical and negative. Being judgmental is the greatest sign of mediocrity and unless some revolutionary steps are taken this looks unlikely to change.
The journalist’s choice of words, their feeling less expression, the children’s lack of regard for the institution, the trivialization of their family norms, the general lack of respect for the fellow Indian’s the insulting attitude towards our heritage, the mindless following of Babas, imitation for a western yardstick of culture, all are not symptoms that the education in India is in good shape. A very objective analysis will point out that the root cause of all our anomalies and contradiction is the way we have been brought up, our parenting our basic and primary education.The western model of education banks itself on physical infrastructure like buildings, equipments, classroom while in India the emphasis had always been on the teacher, the bonding between guru shishya and among the shishya itself. The perceptual distortion has been that most of the decisions where quality is to be judged is taken on the basis of buildings and glamour. This looks unlikely to change in the near future.
What Role education can play?
Education has the ability to Help Differentiate right from wrong, Differentiate Emotions, Develop observation, Equip the person with an ability and process to logic it out. It is a process of thought and action synchronization, Wisdom to respond in right way and right time, and make a person humane. Without these traits it will be mediocrity that will rule.
Education is wisdom, and wisdom is Wisdom is intellect, Wisdom is observation, Wisdom is involvement orWisdom is love and empathy, and Wisdom is TRUE knowledge. Some acquire knowledge to grow their wealth, while others use their wealth to go back to the classroom. We have hardly been realizing the value of wisdom and knowledge in society and the impact it can have, there are no indications that we are moving towards curbing that mediocrity.Knowledge is not truly understood in India and it’s truly ironic that India knew knowledge like no one, and utilized it. The present mindset about knowledge in India has been very conducive. To obtain knowledge one has to be receptive, to obtain knowledge one has to be intellectual;To obtain knowledge one has to be flexible, and To be Imaginative as well. None of these elements comprise either the present educational milieu nor they are on agenda of either the Government or the people or even the understanding of the people and the mode in which they will understand.
Education is thought, and learning in a combination. These two concepts are inseparable. In India these concepts are not combined and are seen separable without any obvious reference to the fact that Learning without thought is labour lost, thought without learning is perilous. Education is ability to engage a thought, and the greatest sign of Intellectual Mind is to be able to engage a thought without agreeing to it. What can be said of a society that is becoming more and more tolerant and more and more judgmental, unless the new generation knows how to engage a thought and learn from that Mediocrity is going to survive. The present generation shows no sign of shedding their inabilities and it is this generation that is going to carry itself in the future.
Education is about respecting women
Education is about respecting women, not because of a saying or protocol but because of values of respect, because they have contributednot only to economic development but without whom society would have stopped functioning. Women have single handedly contributed to all round development of society, of nature, and also in economic development.Women have been the First teachers for everyone, as the First five years belong to them, they are the one who have Deep understanding of their child, they are the one who are able to Understand and correct a child as the first lesson and form varied angles. The status of the women everywhere in the country goes unnoticed and unsung, the respectability of being a women and women as a brand has taken a sever beating by the present generation in India. Its unlikely that with time unless something radical is going to happen, the present generation will learn to respect or learn to understand the social capital value of respect.
Education is about ability to bear failure with courage and is the best proof of character than anyone can give. It has hardly been taught to the present generation, how to bear failure, how to learn from failure, how to gather dignity from failure. Indeed the end of education is character.
Our problems lie somewhere, we are solving the problem somewhere else. The present form of education has not evolved to address the problem of identity loss, the present form must not always address the problem quantitatively. It will require, apart from quantitative reach a much more elaborate qualitatively oriented ‘education’ that is not merely information, and literacy. The concept of value learning in the digital age is hardly going to be reformed to include emotive and sentimental issues.
Teachers are now considered as commodities (and they also make themselves as commodities) and students as consumers. Something that is associated with creative thinking, creative learning can never be, and never ever be reduced to so mundane and mechanical. Teaching like music best flourishes in non-mechanical ambience fuelled by respect and affection the teachers and/or singers get from their students and audiences. The mentors in Indian case had always been full of gravity and character, never as agents of public relations manager masquerading as teachers. A teacher in India in order to be identified has to market himself not be knowledgeable or value loaded and this part is completely antithetical to learning environment.
Indians learned from everything-nature, plants, animals local people downtrodden, big and small. Their core concept was based on evolving, understanding enlarging and respecting, local wisdom. The various water harvesting techniques that have evolved-ahar, pyne, johad, zing, thingal are examples of genius of local wisdom in resource management. Unfortunately, we have followed the west in emulating their resource ‘exploitation’ by building large dams, completely ignoring the local wisdom, and the results are for everyone to see. Dams may have solved a problem or two, but they have created more problems than they have solved.The respect that “One can learn from everything or anything” is completely missing and is also not in many school curriculum that we can hope the situation to be better in the future.
No, mediocrity will not survive and persist.
This is largely because the value of “education” in some quarters is being re-identified. Howsoeverdifficult the education scenario in the country may be, there are some lights and some departures from the established norm of so called education. The new meaning and interpretation is related to
- Understanding of increased role information content in education,
- Giving a proper direction to career through education.
- Increasing realization of the purpose of education to be using the best talents in their respective fields, for which they are meant.
- Use of technology to help imagination that is by augmented reality, immersive technology, and virtual reality
- Evolution and development of new vistas of learning and increasing microspecialisation of the newly identified branches of knowledge for 21st century world.
- And addition of new forms of attitudinal learning, attitudinal transformation and new learning through thought leadership training, perception and knowledge management skills.
None of these trends will move in a mediocre education system. They have to be fully evolved to meet the nuances of new world, new knowledge frontiers and with new technology. The upcoming world will get it interwoven with local wisdom, in a glocalised manner and has to unlearn new forms, new thinking. There will be no mediocrity; there will be only substances fit for every person, every human, every student and anyone for whom learning will be fun…. It has to be fun to sustain and survive education by converting and prevent mediocrity to individual’s talent niche and specialization.