What Education Stands For

What Education Stands For

 (By Suhana Ahmed ) 

Image By:- Goutham Sagar

Education is said to be one of the most important things in our life and it is one of six fundamental rights given to the citizens by the constitution of India. Unfortunately, not everyone has the chance to enjoy their right and even the ones who aren't getting a proper education because there are flaws and faults in the Indian Education System. It has turned into a memory-based system rather than knowledge and skill-enhancing, leaving even the educated class unaware of many important things. 

People have become more and more attracted to the thought of gaining degrees even if they do not prefer going to classes and actually study something and gain knowledge. Also, the institutions have certain cut-offs on the basis of merit for someone to graduate, and even there are entrance examinations for colleges and courses. 

The thing is that even when there is no proper education provided for various courses in many universities and colleges, there is always a rush to get into them. But the question is do we need degrees or do we need skills and morals? Do we need just literacy or do we need actual education?

Humans have proved many times that we need to be more educated than just being literate. The so-called educated and white-collar people in society are actually a major threat to society many times. Many people have lost the social values and ethics in themselves and are busy accumulating as much wealth as they can by suppressing the poor and underprivileged class of society. 

History has it that the people with privileges always had the leverages. The elite classes of any society have always had access to the best of the things, including education. Most of the time, it was just men from the upper-class division who had access to proper and formal education, and that led to a great parity amongst people, creating a barrier and broadening the distance between the privileged and the others. This also led to discrimination, slavery and so many other social evils that are still haunting us. 

It is an established point that amongst the Indian population, the number of literate men is more than that of literate women, which in a way puts the monopoly in the hands of a man whilst a woman struggles to even speak. There takes birth the gender inequality and discrimination which started all the social mistreatment of women class.

The cruelty doesn't end with tormented and suppressing humans, but it extends towards torturing animals in the name of fun. There have been many videos going around all over the internet where a bunch of people either tie a die a dog and beat it or throw it into the river, or throw an animal as if it's an object. People pass racist, sexist and lewd comments without even realizing that they're wrong. That is where our education has failed. Therefore, we need to re-define education and give it to everyone irrespective of any difference. 

Coming to the other aspect of the need of the right education and morals- We are growing exponentially in numbers. In the last 100 years, the world’s population has increased from less than 2 billion to nearly 8 billion. That’s a leap of around 6 billion people.

We have to understand that we have limited resources available. Thankfully, we still have enough to serve everybody on the planet but the resources are unevenly distributed leading to a majority of the population not have any access to even the basic needs of survival. There is no way that these people can afford to study in private schools and colleges, and certainly very difficult to get jobs in the companies. That is why the government needs to take the responsibility of giving education to them a little more seriously.

The problem doesn’t stop here, the truth is even more troublesome, nearly 40% of food produced in India is wasted. It took a lot of labor, machines, and money to produce that, more than anything there are still people dying of hunger.

Also, with the increase in population, we need to produce more food by using limited resources and without deteriorating the soil, water, and other natural resources. This can only be done by using an organic way of farming. In India, generally, farmers are involved in the traditional way of farming where there is no proper data of the usage of minerals, pesticides, etc. Also, they don’t know how and when to sow what kind of crop. This is because most of our farmers are uneducated and “educated” people refrain from farming considering it to be a profession of illiterate and poor. 

It’s high time now, we need to use new and advanced types of machinery and ideas to go for organic farming, it is the only way we can produce more and harmless. 

This is a time when every other thing is going digital, and we know there are many who face issues in using online resources. To keep up with the pace we need to learn digital kinds of stuff to have easy access to our banks, government policies, etc. There are people who don’t follow government policies even when they are beneficial to them. Like, birth control and family planning, etc. They consider it an intrusion to their personal life but they don’t understand that their personal life is also a part of our society. That is why we need education. To enrich our moral and social sense of responsibility and to use the resources available in a sustainable way.

We need to learn many things. Education isn't refined to studying the syllabus, it extends to applying the learned things in our lives, learning morals and ethics, treating everyone equally. Sex education is a very important thing at the moment. We have a long way to go and large steps to be taken. 

We need education to bring peace. We need education to bring equality. We need education to survive. We need education for better lives. We need education to learn and unlearn and bring a positive change. 

“Education can be a tool to promote equality. For that, we need equality in education”

Disclaimer:-

The opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Light de Literacy and LDL does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.