What is education ? What is it ???

It's been a while since I wrote here. But now that I am writing...I would like to touch upon an issue that is core to modern thinking any day....education. For all you know, education is not such a freakin' easy word to understand. It may mean literacy to some, but for others it is more complicated than rocket science. I want to write about education and understand what it means to me as an individual. More importantly, does education go hand in hand with modernism ? Or as the epithet goes, is education "useful excess baggage" ?

A debate on modernism will not be complete unless you talk about education. Education is something that we find everywhere, yet crave for it, and quote numbers (read literacy rate, school dropout ratio, underemployment ratios, etc etc...) to substantiate our claim that education is lacking in the country.

Now the fact remains that India is home to a large majority of the world's uneducated populace. I personally do not believe that numbers are important, so I am not quoting statistics. The fact is that I don't need to either. You can FEEL the pangs of hunger of the uneducated, you can SEE the helplessness in their knowledge-deprived eyes, you can HEAR it in their pleas for liberation.

Who really needs the numbers ?

What I'm really trying to say is....all these programs, plans, packages, YOJANAS (as they are known in India) are confined to social science textbooks that students desperately try to read FOR PASSING an exam. I can only sigh...and feel a subtle helplessness overcoming me...

Over these years of liberation, we have not been able to educate our people.

Am I talking about India's literacy rate ? I think that's around 65%. It was 65% when I checked 3 years ago, and it is almost the same (or so I think) even now. How does it matter ? Because the ground reality is not stagnant like the number 65%. Let me assure you, the dynamism of helplessness is grounding India's underprivileged like never before.

Edcuation, in my view, cannot confine itself to the alphabet and our stand on literacy must be debated once again. In a modern context, education implies empowerment. Education MUST COMPULSORILY CALL for a sense of power, liberation and freedom of thought. Reading or writing a simple sentence in any language - may be literacy...but NOT education. I don't think I need to stress the divorcement of literacy and education here.

So where does the problem lie today... ???

Does it lie with the Government ?
Does it lie with the victims themselves ?
Does it lie with God ?
Does it lie with us (supposedly, privileged individuals (remember..I am blogging...not even writing)) ?

I cannot, unfortunately, pen an answer to that one. I consider it to be a matter of opinion. Modernism revels in necessity, not altruism.

Modernism is education. Education is modernism.