Do We Students Get Enough Time for Growth and Development

8/8/2019 Do We Students Get Enough Time for Growth and Development

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Do we students get enough time for

growth and development?

These things shall be;

That todays student race;

Which ought be diligent and so wise;

Will have unknown burdens on their souls,

And signs of depression in their eyes;

On 14th of March 1879, in the dead of night, nothing sans horror and a

deathly hush could be witnessed in the streets of town Ulm, in Germany. Yet it

was the same night, when in one of the thatched cottages which fell on the left

side of the street, a Jewes bore a child with such an incongruous cast of mind

that it scarcely bore a passing resemblance to a normal human body. With the

passage of time, right from the boy's infancy to teenage, this transcendentalappearance was followed by aberrant behaviour at home and at school.

Without further ado, some local doctors were consulted for their notion about

the matter but all their endeavours turned out futile and fruitless as the boy

didn't even show the slightest signs of progress.

Some of the doctors called it dyslexia, some others named it dysmorphia and

those left labelled it dysparxia, but the fact was that these were all

assumptions and presumptions which were, for his mother, entirely beyond

the pale. A matter of perennial vexation as it was, there was something that

really haunted her and that was the boys deteriorating grades. Never in her

scariest reveries would it have flitted across her mind that the boy would one

day arrive home with his matriculation report card on which it might have

been written in bold letters..."Failed!" .Hopelessness and exasperation

overwhelmed her and as she was about to raise her hand on the innocent little


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soul, her eyes froze and she kept on glaring at the remark scribbled at the

apex of the card. It was from the boy's mathematics teacher and it read.

"This boy is now capable enough to teach me mathematics.

This Little wretch" as his mother had titled him is known to the world by

the name Albert Einstein, the touchstone of intelligence and rational thinking

and indisputably one of the most influential personalities in the history of

modern day science and technology. The special theory of relativity, the mass-

energy equation(E= mc2), quantum field theory and photoelectric effect are

just a few examples out of his innumerable contributions in the field of science

and especially his theories of relativity and gravitation represented a

profound advance over Newtonian physics and revolutionized scientific and

philosophical inquiry.

Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers that ever existed, was an enigmatic

figure chiefly known for his didactic teaching especially by the methods

boundless questioning and inquiry. Leonardo da Vinci an incomparable

painter, sculptor, draftsman, architect, engineer and a scientist, a personality

whose fame has remained undimmed to the present day the secret of which

rests largely on his unlimited desire for knowledge, a trait that guided all histhinking and behaviour. Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the electric

bulb; a marvellous gift to humanity, held a world record of 1093 patents and

laid the basis of technological revolution of the modern electric world. These

are just handful examples from the bottomless list of people who played

preponderant roles in changing the past, present and future of the globe.

Were all these people exam-toppers of respective ages? Did all of them fetch

A grades and full marks"......The actuality lies in the fact that none of the

three above mentioned had a formal schooling!

With these examples as the background let us reappraise the present day

modern education system and let the reader to gauge and put forth his/her

opinion. As a student I have I fathomed over the years that right from my

kindergarten to my present class I have been ,willy-nilly running a race , a

race of marks with my own friends and classmates and with their situation


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being almost the same. "Competition" is the most frequently heard word by

my ears and if I dont compete, I am discarded like useless wrapper which has

got no place to exist except the trash can. Theories like "Might is right" and

"Survival of the fittest" reign and I am left helpless and defenceless every

time. This is one of the pre-dominant factors of the unbearable stress that wethe students face. Stress takes no time to get converted into depression,

frustration and hypertension which further lead to suicides, drugs and other

abhorrent practices as is lucid from the everyday incidents around us.

According to a report "Students are the fastest-growing market for

antidepressants. and studies show depression is a contributory factor to fatal

coronary disease.

"But where at all do we go wrong ?.What is the right way? Where lies the

defect?"

The crowning defect of our existing educational system that requires the

immediate and earnest consideration is its excessive passive and mechanical

character. The student plays no active role in the attainment of knowledge.

His entire education is passive and mechanical which is, I suppose, worse than

illiteracy. Ideas thoughts and concepts are loaded on his mind which he

cannot digest; he only crams and therefore they never become his own. Our

educational system in the words of Dr. Annie Besant is just Filling boysheads with a lot of disjointed facts poured into the heads as into a basket; to

be emptied out again in the examination room, and empty basket carried out

again into the world.

Further, the existing system of our education is predominantly academic and

theoretical. It is theoretical as a rule and practical by chance. The student is

taught lessons from books, but not lessons from life. In other words, he is

provided with knowledge, but not with wisdom which is just like "Receiving

food and not being able to release energy from it". He is obliged to know the

history of Greece of 200 years ago, but he knows nothing of what is happening

in our own country today. He knows more about the English country Council

than about the municipality of his own town.


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Now we come to the questions of moral and cultural development of our

students. What do our institutions do for the character-building of their

students? We have to admit sadly that today there functions finishes with

imparting the students bits of information. They dont include in them a love

of virtue and righteousness, a sense of self-respect and personal dignity.

Our students are poor not only intellectually, but physically as well. The

unsound minds live in unsound bodies. Groups of pale, thin youths meet the

eye at the portals of schools, colleges and universities. And in this regard I am

quite sure as eggs is eggs that it is so because they never are given time for

activities like sports and games and are made to think that sports and

extracurricular are useless and nothing more than a wastage of precious time

and wealth. There is hardly any provision in our schools, colleges anduniversities for systematically physical training, games and sports and other

extracurricular activities. Lack of physical training leads the students to loss

in other ways too for they never learn the dignity of labour. They begin to

shun, labour of every kind, physical or intellectual. They become ideal, ease-

loving and extravagant. Even Mahatma Gandhi mourned this neglect of

physical work in our system of education.

In view of the foregoing defects and shortcomings, our system of education

calls for a radical change. One of the first and the greatest task that faces us

today is to overhaul and reconstruct our education machinery, for it is on the

regeneration of our education machinery that the regeneration of the nation

depends. We have to devise as-early-as possible as comprehensive national

scheme of education which seeks to brings about a complete and harmonious

development of all factors of human personality.

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Do We Students Get Enough Time for Growth and Development