Since we have already talked at length about the issues in the present Indian Educational process in my last blog, let’s take one step further and figure out ways to educate ourselves without becoming overly dependent and fixated on the educational system. Sure, the system is there to provide a structured year-wise curriculum for the students but what we also have to keep in mind is that an educational process doesn’t just have to comprise the academic segment, it includes a lot of other facets that provide for the overall development of an individual, we’ve been misled to believe that education is all about books, copies, tests, marks and those god-awful parent-teachers meetings, I swear they should be renamed to be called ‘parents-teachers humiliation contest’.
The phrase ‘education’ itself has been distorted to such an extent that the moment someone utters the word ‘education’, all we can think about is our school tests and those dreadful all-nighters we pulled off the day before the exam.
The English word education is derived from the Latin word ‘Educare or ‘educate meaning to ‘bring out the gifts of a person but what happens today in our schools is the polar opposite of what the word describes. The gifts that a child possesses are actually pushed aside and he/she is filled with useless information that he’ll forget anyway after 10 days. Please describe to me the utility of remembering that “sin theta/cos theta= tan theta”.
All education has become today is a way to train you to become an employee, and let me remind you that this system is performing terribly in doing that too since unemployment is rising at an all-time high because the students have no practical exposure. The philosophy of having 1 sports period a week clarifies what education has been made out to be, ‘boring and dull’.
“Great Mr. Blog writer, but what do we do about all of this, how do we tackle this god-forsaken educational system”. Fine, I’ll tell you, but remember that I can only speak on my behalf and my personal experiences, so don’t take my advice as god’s gospel but rather as a high school student’s advice. So here goes:
· Don’t just sit there hoping and dreaming that the system will miraculously change one day and rose petals will start raining over your head, get up smell the coffee and take over the steering wheel, be the driver of your life’s car. Keep doing something parallelly with your school education, don’t let your schooling become the be-all and end-all.
· Don’t let other people make decisions for you, don’t let them make you walk out of your interests, for example, if you want to study humanities and if you are interested in it, to hell with people’s opinions, do what you feel you are good at, cause when you do what you’re not so good at, no matter how hard you try you’ll always be mediocre at that cause you have no real reason to be doing that in the first place and feel out of place.
· Follow your hobbies and passions actively and passionately, don’t let people tell you that you should leave everything behind and become a bookworm in order to be a success story, those people are probably frustrated and unhappy anyways, that’s a f****ed up advice for two primary reasons 1) Its not sustainable and cannot be practiced in a long-term fashion 2) Monotony will hit you so hard that you might even end up being bitter and frustrated.
· Study to be knowledgeable and not to become a nerdy-topper, let the grades take a backseat and the learning drive you forward, trust me being knowledgeable and educated beats the shit out of being a topper with 95% marks but with no memory of what you learned, in the long run, the knowledgeable person will always win.
· Don’t predicate your self-worth, self-respect, and self-identity based on how you performed in a stupid exam, school exams don’t test your intelligence, this is a proven psychological fact, they simply check whether you know how to give exams and how good are you at giving exams, nothing is permanent, life is transient, situations change, give yourself space to breathe, don’t overburden yourself with your own expectations, the focus of learning and growing and things will start falling in place automatically.
· Don’t compare yourself with others, this is a no-brainer, every person has different parents, different environments, different strengths & weaknesses, different upbringings, different abilities and skills, and funniest of all they have different genes, they have been biologically and genetically programmed to be different from you, so comparing yourself to others is as silly as comparing a tiger to a dinosaur.
· Read more, an educational system as toxic as ours, leads us to become fearful of books and reading in general, don’t let this fear take over, keep reading whether in order to develop a skill or just as a hobby.
· Learn to differentiate between positive criticism and douchebags just trying to belittle you, whenever you sense even a hint of condescension and toxicity, just leave the conversation, you don’t have to sit there and listen to their bullshit, but do pay close attention to positive criticisms because they just might be the last piece of the puzzle you’ve been trying to solve.
· Be confident in your skin, don’t be out of place because you’re different or think differently, introvert or extrovert, the greatest inventors of this world were also considered to be the greatest wackos who walked the planet. Own your uniqueness, make it your thing, let people know that you’re fine the way you are.
· Develop skills and abilities that resonate with your personality, it’s a psychologically proven fact that humans possess more than 7 abilities and intelligence, so you might not even be built to become a mathematician as you might have naturalistic or literary abilities and might be completely bereft of their existence, so get up and explore your interests, you might end up discovering something completely unheard of, and then develop your skills in those areas, be skilled to such an extent that marks become a secondary factor.
That’s all for today, keep following me for new blogs every week.
Today's Quote is:
“Creativity is as important as literacy” ― Ken Robinson
CBSE CLASS 12th Board Exams Cancelled Fun Vs Reality:
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