Education and enlightenment

Of late, I have become a little bit philosophical searching for some questions arising out of my soul. Most of the time I don't really get the answer to the question: am I educated? The raison détre is that the actual meaning of education seems to be miserably missing in our engagement with education. The so-called educated ones think that a mistake is a sin that leaves no scope for a correction. This is the sign of autocracy; in a democratic setting, mistakes are corrected through scientific tools such as dialogues and feed-backs. A person is attacked by the goons and nobody comes to help him or her or think of a situation where 'mastans' (musclemen) are seen marching through the streets with guns in hand but there is none to protest. Rather, people flee away out of fear; a bus takes the life of a pedestrian but none is found to take the body to hospital; no other than a minister stands in support of bus drivers who continue to kill innocent people through rash driving. It seems to me that everyone is busy in building own fortune - a sense of collective and human approach is totally absent in our society. By and large, people are living in a reign of terror and they are continually being crippled by the fear that terrorism produces. Then, why do we need education, to fear and flee? Education is not meant mainly to pursue one's maximising spree (profit or utility); it is to serve the country, society and the people around the educated person. The purpose of education is to produce a society free of exploitation, unruly behaviour, and fundamentalist frame of mind-set. The above mentioned unfortunate happenings surrounding us apparently militate against the main motto of education, and point to our perilous position. In our boyhood, we read: lekha pora kore je, gari ghora chore shey (one who reads and writes, rides on cars and horses). I find a serious flaw in the epitome. Why should education help us moving in cars and riding on horses? Thus everyone, after having read and write a lot, runs after material maximisation in terms of accumulation of assets (cars and flats). The teaching should be: lekha pora kore je, manusher sheba kore shey (one who reads and writes, serves the people). Our education does not have creativity; students are not given the opportunities to be creative. They are taught to memorise the important pages of text books. In schools and colleges, students should have syllabus that permit them to visit various places, a good number of organisations and different segments of the society so that they can accumulate practical knowledge about their surroundings. How many economists can name various varieties of paddy produced in the country? Surely, some of them know it, although all of them live in a country that is the third largest producer of paddy in the world. The disparity in education is sharp. Kindergarten schools are very expensive because they provide all amenities; while comparable primary schools in rural areas have no sheds over head, so to speak. Let us look at the disparity in university education: in the past, a larger portion of public university students used to come from the rural areas. Now it has been reversed. Again, think of the resource allocation in public universities: only 10-15 per cent of the total allocation goes to research, and the rest to salaries and wages. How can you build a prosperous society where public universities cannot produce research outputs? Digital education is good but it has the danger of producing a digital divide. So, we have to be cautious in the campaign because disparity in education results in disparity in income afterwards. Allegedly, the media has not played its due part in educating our generations. Just look at the movies - western or Indian - where criminal activities are highlighted most. Look at the dresses that the actors and actresses wear. The young talents turn into those types of a fantasy world and begin to wear jins, shorts and drink alchohol. Read the newspapers and most of them are negative news. In western countries, kids are protected from watching adult movies; in our country parents and children watch them together. Formal education is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to produce human beings. There is no doubt that we need development of human capital to maximise economic growth; but more importantly, we need human beings to build a just society. To generate human beings, we need to consider another line of reasoning to reshape, recast or re-orientate our present education system. The old saying should be reversed: Lekha pora kore je, valo manush hoi shey (one who reads and writes, becomes a good human being). The nation needs good people with mutual trust, cooperative spirit and less economic, political and social disparity. Thus, let us care for our future generation - the future leaders of the nation - not the way we have been driving so far. As it stands now, the brains are likely to become liability for the nation. To turn them into an asset, a serious thought needs to be given about our education sector. The writer is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Finance and Banking, Faculty of Business Studies, Jahangirnagar University. Courtesy: 'Bangladesh at 40: Changes and Challenges,' a publication of Faculty of Business Studies, Jahangirnagar University (JU) to mark its holding of a three-day seminar on the afore-mentioned theme from December 09 to December 11, 2011 at JU at Savar. The Financial Express is the media partner of the event. Email: abdulbayes@yahoo.com