SPIRITUAL EDUCATION.
Posted by bmhegde on 1
“The Lord’s Prayer may be committed to memory quickly, but it is slowly learnt by heart.”
Albert Camus.
The caption might raise a few eyebrows especially of those that think that spirituality is connected with religions. Far from it. The word spirituality is used here in a special way. Living by the spirit is spirituality. What does that mean? Each one of us has a spirit in us.
That keeps on telling us each time to do the right thing but we have learnt to ignore that urge of our conscience over time. In short, this is walking one’s talk in real life and not on the television screen talking to a media man. Monetary economy and cut throat competitions have taken a heavy toll of the moral fibre in us and have robbed us of our real inner happiness. We try and surround ourselves with all the gadgets and circumstances to make us artificially happy but, the dichotomy between the moral urgings and our doings keeps on building negative destructive emotions like hatred, jealousy, anger, pride, frustration and depression in us. Modern medical research now points out that these negative destructive emotions are the prime risk factors for major killers like heart attacks, cancer and stroke etc.
By the time one reaches the middle age when social responsibilities and family obligations increase, many people break down and come down with bodily afflictions. Unfortunately, today’s disease centred medical education does not stress these aspects in the training of a doctor. So the patient with a physical malady is looked at from the redcutionist point of view and the broken pieces of the body are mended with temporary benefit only to recur sooner than later. Even if a rare doctor gets inkling into his patients’ mental make up, he/she is not adequately equipped to deal with it: the medical education itself is reductionist and does not teach the holistic healing methods. Single organ specialist does not understand the working of other organs, leave alone understanding the working of the body as a whole in consonance with its environment.
The cure lies in changing the educational pattern starting from the elementary school right up to the professional colleges. Today’s education teaches only skill but real education should teach, in addition, justice, truth and magnanimity which are as important, if not more important, than skill. Skill could be acquired at a later stage also. These other qualities of head and heart need to be taught right from day one in the KG class lest the child should lose faith in mankind as a whole. Teaching values in education is easier said than done but, if we are sincere and serious about it, this could be done easily. No amount of preaching would change the world. Man learns by examples only. This starts at home where the parents are ideal examples to their children. Teachers take the place of parents in school. A conscientious, diligent, thinking teacher motivates his/her students to follow suit by his/her example.
Let not our schools come in the way of true education for our children, the leaders of tomorrow, for the country to come out of the moral nihilistic valley into which it has sunk since political independence. A gunny bag full of heavy books, tuitions after school hours, and compulsory home work at night leaves the child very little time to think and enjoy his/her childhood. Our children never enjoy their childhood these days. In addition, the Damocles sword of the end-year examinations, where cramming up of factual data has become both a necessity and a useless rigmarole, has to give place to on going teacher evaluation clubbed with, if possible, peer evaluation, to bring out the best in the child-the true e ducare. Transparency of dealings both at home and in school would add greatly to this system of education. We would be not only producing creative adults but honest ones at that to put an end to the cancer of corruption in every walk of life. Let us not get deluded that because we have come up in the same system, this system could not have been that bad. A little introspection would prove one wrong in this premise.
Higher education, while stressing on the methodology, need not waste too much time in feeding factual data that will have no relevance to the student in real life situations when the students get out into the wide world that is both complex and dangerous, to say the least. In practice, every new entrant to this world, after his/her qualifications, today, takes plenty of time to unlearn what he has learnt at school and college and relearns to live. The fine art of living and letting others live is never taught in school and college. Students never get to realize that true happiness comes from helping others and not by getting. We give them enough technical know how and skill to earn a living. That will Earlier we change this system the better. Just changing the syllabus from the State one to the CBSC or ICSE and trying to change the textbooks, each political outfit trying to out do the other in this game; will not serve the true purpose of education, which is nation building and character building. Professional education is crying for an urgent change from the reductionist faulty logic to that of the wholistic pattern.
This pattern of education would bring down the burden of major chronic killer diseases to manageable levels and may be in the long run get rid of them altogether. This world where human tsunamis destroy more people than the real tsunamis, we need humankind to be tranquil. This goal could also be accomplished when once we become educated and not just literate degree holders earning a livelihood. Serve Janaaha Sukhino Bhavathu!
“The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
Martin Luther King Jr.