Everyday Musings > MisEducation

My friend R and M once went to visit a famous architect. He was about 90 years old and they chatted with him about architecture and working in the old times. They noticed that in his living room there was a blackboard filled with scribbles and formulae. They asked him what that was, and he said, oh I've decided I want to a nuclear physicist.

I've been surfing to check education links and noticed that almost all graduate and post graduate courses in India have an age limit. I honestly fail to see what education has to do with age. Why can't one pursue education all of one's life. Take up architecture studies when one is forty or graphic design at 50. Why does age have to be such a huge factor, a cut off? What does age have to do with inclination and talent?

Came across a feature in The Guardian, on Bridgemary Community School in Hampshire. The school abandoned age-based classes and grouped its 1,000-plus pupils according to their ability. The teachers say it's been great so far. That all the pupils are at about the same level and the younger ones bring a lot of enthusiasm and energy into the classes and that really rubs off on the whole group. It's an energising process for everybody, teachers included.

The feature also said that the 'secondary school's radical shakeup has brought grumblings from within the education establishment. Teachers' leaders have questioned its effectiveness and some parents have raised fears of a bullying epidemic as younger pupils are taught alongside teenagers three or four years their senior.'

But what Cheryl Heron, the head teacher said, stayed with me. 'The main thing is to do the right thing for these students. That means if they are good enough they are old enough.'

It made me think of our education system. While its rigorous and there's plenty of good in it, but I wonder if it's based on the fears and conveniences of those who created it. Was the good of the children a socialist good or was it really concerned with each student getting his/her due?

I imagine an India where there is no age based education, where anyone could study anything, at any point in time. I see more creativity, more original thought, more renewing of one's talents, more discovery, more enthusiasm. And less regret over missed opportunity or time having flown by, less stress about growing old.

Also perhaps then, they will also look at why education is restrictive? Why can't an arts student take up architecture or study at NID? Why can't a science student elect to do philosophy, physics and biology? Why this demarcation of streams? Life is not like that.

Education strives to prepare you for life. But ours seems to slot us into holes we can't get out of later. My friend S wants to move away from the city, and send her child to a school where education is based on life and what we see around us. That's how they learn; by touching, feeling, talking, experimenting. She says the normal schools produce the same mould and she wants her child to have a chance at individuality. A Parathasarthy, in his book, The Fall of the Human Intellect, speaks of a generation stuffed with much knowledge and intelligence but bereft of reasoning skills, of judgement, of original thought.

Maybe there's a lesson in that for all of us.