Education, among others, is also about enabling the graduate to be in control. It should empower the initiate to know the essential ideas of living well and equip one with necessary life skills. Everyone should know the fundamentals of the economy, civic life, and health. For instance, when I say health I mean to say that a person should have a fair knowledge of diseases, their causes and cures. The first thing is that they should not fall ill, if fall ill, they must know the basics of cure, and further if the problems aggravate, the person should know enough not to be duped by the practitioners. The ancient university of Nalanda had a compulsory course on medicine for all the resident scholars. They knew it so well that only a healthy body possesses a good mind.
The fact is that our present pedagogy, a colonial graft, seeks to overawe pupils. It basically imparts the knowledge of big and extraordinary things, ideas over lived realities, the universals, the meta realities, but it strictly keeps away the students from learning how to negotiate with all those gigantic phenomena. They create wedges and counterpose norms against mores, ideals against practices, and learning against the living. Today's pedagogy forges the graduates only to fit in the different frameworks. A good number of people do learn the tricks of the trade, but the hard way through trial and error, or outside the ambit of formal education. In other words, they are trained primarily for clientelism. And, the greater part of the pedagogy is simply wasteful: the pieces of ideological stuff. In a nutshell, colonial education creates dependent personas: everyone is prepared to be cheated or exploited by others.
Niraj Kumar Jha
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