The alarming state of affairs in my God’s Own Land

God’s Own Land – Kerala is blessed with all the good things in the world. The inhabitants are good. They are well educated. The per capita income is high. The land is spawn with palatial mansions. The picturesque landscape with mountainous High Range, fertile Midland interwoven with numerous rivers small and big and the long Costal Area with beautiful beaches and lagoons: all these add up to give an impression of a paradise. But the question that persists is, is it a paradise? Can we try to answer this question?

Let’s analyze the situation prevailing in the land given as a boon to the people of this land. Kerala is a place where the highest suicidal rate is recorded in the world. Per head alcohol consumption is highest in the world. Number of family break ups is soaring high. Old age homes are mushrooming everywhere. Sexual harassment and abuses are everyday incidents in printed and electronic media. Visual Kerala is beautiful but the other side of midnight is very ugly. In nut shell we can say that whatever social evils prevalent in the world, in greater degree they are visible in Kerala. Why? No one can answer them in a simple way. In thirty- forty years back the scenario was entirely different. 

My firm conviction is that our education is the root cause of everything. Our children do not get proper and quality education from various quarters which help them to lead a successful life. When we talk about the aims of education we may think about getting a good job, crystallizing character with good traits, socialization and acquiring knowledge. But the ultimate aim of education is to help us lead a good life.  The present day symptoms we see in our society do not give the impression that our education is serving the purpose. 

In order to lead a successful life the child must be trained to face the problems he or she encounters.  In schools the children are taught to solve problems. But in the present day situation, either the parents or some experts solve the problems for them and they snatch away the benefit of them. When a child takes up the problem, unconsciously the child undergoes various thinking processes like analysis, synthesis, application of knowledge already acquired, problem solving, creative thinking, critical thinking, evaluation etc. to arrive at the solution. 

The net result of thinking processes is the growth of intelligence which is the tool required for future life. The memorization of end product of somebody’s thinking only increases the memory power of the child which diminishes with time. One who purposefully develops the intelligence comes handy in the future when life problems arise. This thinking takes place smoothly when teaching and learning takes place in one’s own mother tongue. In almost all the countries where the educational visionaries insist their children to do the schooling up to secondary level in their mother tongue because they know that children are the assets of the nation.

Malady of Kerala is the attempt of the government to bring in privatization in educational sector especially in pre-primary, primary and secondary levels. The money mongers, in order to squeeze more money from the stake holders, played with English medium. Thus we have many ill famed bakeries with unskilled bakers (teachers) producing half baked bread (children). These hapless children are denied of all pleasantries of good education. They waste away their precious childhood and teenage period without imbibing anything good for their life.  They cram and cram for good marks in class. Parents shove them to these English shops to acquire English language.  But the end result is no English is acquired and good education is a mirage for them.  For acquiring English there is no need to teach them in English medium, just send them to short term spoken English classes they will master more English with less expense. Spoken form of a language is the first thing that one should get which our English medium schools are not giving our children.

We fall for this trap because English has a prominent place in international circle.  Recently someone has jokingly remarked that Chinese and Japanese languages are going to take the place of English. Then we Keralites will have schools with Japanese and Chinese Medium.  When our children learn in other languages their natural thinking processes will be hampered by language backwardness.  In order to cope up with peer group challenges, they resort to mugging up the learning materials without assimilating anything. Let us free our children from this burden and allow them to enjoy learning in their mother tongue. They will go for some extra reading assimilating values and customs of the society and grow in our culture. When the mind is vacant of any good thing all evils will resides in the virgin mind and bring froth demons we abhor.

Socialization, its cradle is the family itself. It starts from the family. But the present day children are growing up in the protective shield of grown ups in the family. No parent allows the children to take up stress and strain of day to day life and get trained. Parents are doing everything for the children.  In practice we can say that children are living in artificial situation, a sort of incubator not in the real life situation. They are not assigned any responsibility and the only task to perform is to swallow food and mug up study materials. When it comes to peer group activities, they are not permitted to go outside the premises of the house. The feature of the villages in Kerala is that each house is separated from the neighboring one by a compound wall. They are denied the opportunity to mix up with children in the neighborhood.

Peer group activities foster many good qualities in children. Any ill effect which may arise can be lifted off easily with timely intervention of the grown ups. Squabbles which naturally surface are solved with auto adjustments without outside interference. Many decisions they make in their group all give many a vista of learning basic principles of democracy. Instead parents try to take the role of peer group in their day to day life. Father and mother play with them argue with them and yield to any demand logical or illogical because of excessive pampering they mete out to the children. Children fail to cope up with a situation where their demands are not fulfilled. They do not know how to give due regards to their parents and finally children are ignorant of giving due consideration to elders and others who deserve better treatment. We are an utter failure in giving social education to our dear children.

Is there any character formation that we intently give to our children? I seriously doubt that. No responsible person is handling this issue. Always paid hands are coming in. No parent is sparing time to make interaction with the children. Most often parents come to know of their children from others. Parents and children are coming together and sitting together in front of television. Whatever is shown over the visual media is not being disapproved by father or mother. Ugly love scenes and suicidal traits fostered in films and serials are making indelible marks in young minds. When they try to make these in their real life what they learn from these media there is no need to raise our eye brows. Ask ourselves whether we are any role model to them to practice. Lots of sermons and talks are there but no proper role model for the younger generation to follow. There is no wonder when our children go after sex symbols and rebels and take them as role models.

Finally our children end up their secondary and higher secondary education with some crammed knowledge. The twelve or fifteen years of education has not helped him to know what he is or who he is.  The education the child received has not brought out the potential in the child. As result without knowing the one’s aptitude, interest or personality a career is chosen unscientifically and pursue higher studies. In some case it clicks and most other cases end up in failures. These hapless victims have no satisfaction in their lives and resort to all the maladies that are visible in our God’s own land. Who is to be blame? 

Michael D’CruzCDO Education