Education in its broadest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another.A step further in the process of education is gaining wisdom through proper education. Wisdom is a deep understanding of people, things, events or situations, empowering the ability to choose or act to consistently produce the optimum results with a minimum of time and energy. Wisdom is the ability to optimally (effectively and efficiently) apply perceptions and knowledge and so produce the desired results. Wisdom is comprehension of what is true or right coupled with optimum judgment as to action.
Education can radically transform society by getting individuals into the habit of learning. If we learn something sincerely, it is an essential source of wisdom to us. It makes a great difference to society. In absence of proper education, you would not be able to pursue your profession as per your aptitude. Your aptitude plays an essential role in your success. Since proper education provides you wisdom to apply your knowledge towards accomplishment of your dreams.
If you wish to transform the society, first you will have to transform yourself by educating yourself properly. Proper education means that you are getting education to enable you to translate your capabilities into action by further grooming yourself up under the guidance of your competent teachers. How would you find competent teachers? It depends upon your target – what target do you have to achieve? How would you like to achieve? What are the sources you have got to invest in the process? But it is sure that once you determine to get proper education, your search would continue to locate out a good Guru for yourself. Until then, you may not be feeling ease.
If you aim at educating inhabitants of a backward village, you may have to understand their basic needs, win their confidence and redirect them to the mission you have determined. In the process, you may get some opposition either from those who might have got some vested interests to keep them uneducated under the impression that once the inhabitants are educated sufficiently to understand what is right or wrong and their illicit interests may not be served thereafter, or the inhabitants may not willing to devote their time in gaining education instead of investing their time to earn something more to meet their basic needs. Therefore, it is required that you must study the basic needs and then, the need of education how that would meet their basic needs first.
In the primary stage, the knowledge of reading, writing and understanding makes miracle in the lives of a poor person. You may not kindly donate him some amount on regular basis – Teach beggars to earn something by doing something fruitful. This experiment got tremendous success when some time ago, in a small village whose adult population was alcoholic till four years ago and 95% of the children did not go to school but roamed the streets, four teachers joined hands to educate the inhabitants of the village to underline a basic truth – educating children is more about undertaking a mission for improvement of your next generation than pursuing a profession for their own livelihood.
Today, the entire village is transformed. When the educating system was started, there was just one concrete house in the entire village; now, most huts have become good houses; many parents no longer drink the way they did; most children go to school and some even talk about becoming doctors or engineers. This is what learning can do to a community and to society as a whole. The results would hardly be different were the model to be replicated in any other remote, under-developed village.
But for this to happen, we have to start with teaching the teachers. Teaching is generally not a well-paid career. For some it was the very last career option because other doors had shut in their face. Teachers may be demoralized by financial difficulty and a perceived lack of prospects. Too often, they feel as if they can do little to shape their students future. Therefore, it is our collective responsibility to infuse self-confidence in teachers and ensure they realize the mighty mission they have undertaken.
When we were at school, our teachers said, “Relax and study, it’s very difficult to fail.” Consequently, we were so relaxed we never failed. Till Class X, not a single student in our batch failed to make it to the next level. Obviously, the teacher has an enormous role to play in giving students the confidence to sail through exams.
In all those countries which have got freedom very recently, educational systems have not undergone major change whereas there has been a lot of advancement. The systems need overhaul to suit to the individual circumstances of each country. As is often said, they are churning out ‘lettered’ rather than ‘learned’ young people. I can best explain the difference by recounting my experience of being taught moral science at school. I was five years old and had been given a small diary to record one good deed I performed every day. But because I had never really been told to do the things I wrote down, I would ask my family every day for suggestion on what to say in the diary. My aunt would say, “Write that you helped an old man cross a road, or that you gave a coin to a destitute man.” I would oblige. But today, it is painful to realize that I was taught such an important subject in so frivolous and uninterested a fashion. I was not instructed to undertake such good deeds myself – just I was filling in the gaps.
History teaching is case in point. Many consider history to be a boring subject and wonder why we need to remember the date certain wars broke out. Or facts about the lives of a handful of people who had nothing to do with us. I used to think this way and always derided history’s importance. It was only much later that I began to take an interest I history. This, because my mentor explained that history was actually the story of man – a story started ages ago, flows through all of us and will never end. This is why we need to know what happened, so that we know what may happen. The way we teach badly needs to be upgraded to suit changing times. Technology can be harnessed to boost visual learning. It may be boring to read about a black hole or craters on the moon, but imagine how interesting it would be for students to see real-life images of such things.
The most important task at hand is educating our underprivileged children, who lack access even to basic schooling. If we started with such disadvantaged children, we can expect that the majority of our young people to know how to read and write five years from now. The future will be one of revolutionary progress in science and technology but if most of our children are not educated enough, they will remain unskilled and unemployable. For real change to come to the society, we
must ‘create’ inspired individuals who are ready to educate the most disadvantaged children. Many people have a strong desire to give something back to society but they cannot do so on their own. They cannot do so on their own. They need some organization support, some infrastructure and a banner to do the work they want to.
If we educate our youths properly, they would be able to get proper employment anywhere in the world. This may remove their fear that their share is being taken away by the outsiders. The outsiders always come inside when the people living may not do the work or may not like to do or may not have the essential caliber to do the work – it occurs due to lack of education or improper education if ever the local youth might have got. We must try to change our education systems in such a way that the youths get employment at the place they live. It appears that local hatred, racial discrimination and other evils take place when there is less opportunity being equally enjoyed by all the inhabitants and those coming from outside. We should improve our education system to bring about wisdom, to understand what is right and what is wrong, to understand why something is right and why something is wrong and to understand further how a wrong can be converted into a right action without depriving someone of his deserving slice of bread.
Be Happy – Wisdom Can Be Gained Through Proper Education.