Why Are Schools Less Important Than a Sunday Afternoon?
One
of the most widely attended social movements take place in the month of June,
every year, in Kerala, the south Indian state. The participants of this social
movement are usually children. This social movement is called Opening of
Schools.
Summer
vacation would end by the first week of June, normally. This year it ends on 31
May. This leads to the opening of schools on 1 June itself. June is also the
month of a captivating season in India, the southwestern Monsoon.
Image Courtesy: Google |
In
To Kill a Mockingbird, Jean Louise and her brother Jim experience a
variety of life experiences during their holidays. Through their plays, they
learn the valuable lessons of life. Their father, Atticus Finch, an advocate,
had already taught both his children how to read and write, especially how to
read and enjoy books. Jean Louise, when went to the school for the first time,
her teacher asked her to inform her father to stop reading to her at home. This
discouragement came from the teacher as she realized that the little girl was
way ahead of her peers in academic matters. It wasn't exactly academic
excellence that Jean Louise exhibited. It was practical wisdom. Just to learn
how to read and write one need not attend schools. The purpose of schooling
must proclaim the development of deeper and more significant skills. The
question is, what skill there is that is more significant than reading and
writing. These are the two major skills and individual should be trained in so
he or she could understand and draw conclusions from the world around one. If
schools need not teach us how to read or write, who else? Where else a child
can learn and master these skills from? And what sustaining need a school has
to exist in our society?
First,
let us confront the question of reading and writing. When I touch this topic, I
feel like I am writing a bit like Bernard Shaw, the great Irish master of
letters and theater. He was quite particular about a human being's handling of
the language, through each of these above-mentioned skills. My humble
conscience does not approve of any relationship with Shaw; however, this social
situation, we must address. If schools need not teach us how to read or write,
who else? Where else a child can learn and master these skills from?
Family,
of course.
The
next question rises in front of us: Why else are schools for?
Well,
there should be a better explanation for the existence of schools and colleges
in our generation, than just as the locations to learn various cultural and
scientific tools. It's easy to learn all those tools from the internet without
half the mess one is sure to encounter during schooling and later in colleges
and universities.
How
much time would we have utilized for making life better, had we spent lesser
time in schools and universities? As the truth of the matter, I am not the only
one to suggest this thought. Napoleon Hill, the author of Think
and Grow Rich, begins his classic with this suggestion. Spend less time in
schools and colleges and utilize the best of your time in activities that give
you more profit.
Atticus
Finch offers a good example of ideal parenting here. Call it fiction and far
removed from reality. However, the real implications of Atticus’s personality
are a grounding spot for academicians to pause and think. Rooted in our deeper
consciousness are the elements to learn from our environment. Like Jean Louise,
many of us possess skills--one set of the other-- even before attending
schools. Most of us might have felt being the odd one when the school
curriculum forces upon us the study of any one of those skills in which we
already have acquired mastery. Through child-plays and familial influences, we
often gain upper hand in many such skills that our schools attempt to feed us
repeatedly through a detailed and unnecessarily complicated curriculum.
This said, he
left them, and return'd no more.—
But rumours hung
about the country-side,
That the lost Scholar long was seen to
stray,
Seen by rare
glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,
In hat of antique shape, and cloak of
grey,
The same the gipsies wore.
__ Matthew
Arnold-1822–1888 ("The Scholar-Gipsy")
Image Courtesy: Arnold/ Guardian |
I have a theory
about existence. This theory, I derived from master of New Thought movement,
author and spiritual thinker, Richard Bach.“This is a test to see if your
mission in this life is complete, if you are alive, it isn't.” This from his book,
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. Taking this perspective,
one must think that there may be a reason schooling system still exists in
India, where it largely borrows from the British.
Perhaps schools
are there to teach us more than letters, and words, and books. They are there
to teach us the value of friendship, and how to get along well with our
neighbors. Along with new umbrellas, notebooks and new uniforms, we take
something more to our new classrooms--the capacity to endure.
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