Column: "School and education should not be confused"

By P. Varadarajan, 21/05/2010

Column: "School and education should not be confused"

(THIS IS TO SAY THAT ONE CAN GO TO SCHOOL,COLLEGES AND GET SO MANY DEGREES, BUT EDUCATION IS WHAT LIFE AND EXPERIENCE TEACHES US...EDUCATION IS MUST AND COMBINATION OF BOTH IS THE BEST)

Our car pulled up at yet another of the scores of traffic signals. Newspaper vendors swarmed us and my friend rolled down the window to buy one. Glancing down the front page, he grimaced and said, “Petrol is costlier again.



We must switch to a horse-cart. "No, papa," said my friend's little son and added, "Let's get a bullock-cart." When I turned to the boy with a quizzical mien, he clarified, "Because we could get milk as well as a means of transport."

After both of us adults had laughed our heads off, my friend turned to his son and began saying, "you fool! Don't you know..." I cut him short and said, "Wait! The boy needs to be corrected, but his naïve innocence beckons his entry into the world of education. Let us make him aware of it, before correcting him."

School and Education should not be confused. Education enrolls one in the womb and graduates one in the tomb. School must be the mouse race that equips one for the rat race, if it is to be congenial for Education through life. Getting the youngsters to know what counts is more important than how to count. All true Education is to develop the mind, not to stuff the memory. Obviously, developing the mind is not simply learning, but learning to learn.




Formerly, we lived in the age of knowledge explosion. Then, it was claimed that knowledge doubled every five years. Now we live in the age of knowledge obsolescence. What is knowledge today will get obsolete sooner than later.

This brings to focus the necessity of learning to learn as against simple learning. Stultifying indeed will be simple learning in the emerging trend of obsolescence of knowledge and what will be of great avail to parry with the situation currently as well as in the future, is learning to learn.

Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana accords due significance to learning to learn. A mighty king Yadu asks a sage, "O Sage, whence did you get this highly penetrating wisdom?" The Sage replies, "Many are my preceptors, O King, selected by my keen sense, acquiring wisdom from whom, I wander in the world free (from all turmoil and worry). Please hear about them. The earth, the air, the sky, water, fire, the moon and the sun, the dove, the boa - constrictor, the sea, the moth, the honey-bee, the elephant, the honey-gatherer, the deer, the fish, Pingala (a courtesan), the osprey, the infant, the maiden, the forger of arrows, the serpent, the spider and the Bhinga (a kind of wasp) - these twenty-four have been accepted, O king, by me as preceptors. From the conduct of these have I learnt all that I had to learn in this life for my good.




The school must facilitate learning to learn. The youngsters must get sensitized and susceptible to learning to learn. They must get the tiller of learning to learn in their vessel to cruise through the ocean of life.

The moot question now is how to get the youngsters acquire this tiller? Obviously, this cannot be achieved, if schooling is circumscribed by merely protracted classroom teaching.

Achieving Education involves classroom teaching, self study, comprising, investigation, recording, reflection, etc., taking to seminar, symposium, group discussion, etc. and practicing and correlating whatever one learns, with everyday life.

It is needless to mention that when schooling gets learner centric, the learner will acquire the tiller of learning to learn for his vessel. We can do no better than concur that the prescription of the sages of ancient India, is the recipe to engender learning to learn.

Positive stance towards failure is the necessary pre-requisite for learning to learn. It must be remembered that falling down does not make one a failure, but staying down does. A failure in life is one who lives, but fails to learn. Each failure offers precious learning experience.




Fifty thousand experiments of Edison failed before he succeeded with a new storage battery. One of his assistants marveled at the bewildering total of his failures. "Results!" exclaimed Edison, "Why man? I have got a lot of results. I know fifty thousand things that won't work".

No wonder with such pronounced penchant to learn from failures, Edison excelled in learning to learn and became the inventor of the world.

Reflection is to reading as digestion is to eating. Learning to learn entails that reading must be in proportion to thinking and thinking in proportion to reading.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking which makes what we read ours, leading to learning. So far as we apprehend and see the connection of ideas, so far they are ours; without that, it is so much loose matter floating in our brain. One may be deep versed in books, but shallow in oneself. Thus Pope writes,

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned number in his head,
With his own tongue still edifies his ears,
And always list'ning to himself appears.

It must be ensured that the youngsters inculcate a habit, a passion for reading; not flying from book to book, with the squeamish caprice of a literary epicure; but read systematically, closely, thoughtfully, analyzing every subject as they go along, and laying it up carefully and safely in their memory. This will ensure their learning to be at the same time extensive, accurate, and useful.

(Mr. Varadarajan is the Principal of RSK Higher Secondary School, Kailasapuram, Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu, India)

Source: India Syndicate