I am an infant. I am a child of below four years. I have not the human life yet. I am doing things what I am being told. I am being asked to rise early to go to school. I astonish why I am asked to go to school so early? I have heard – the Indian scriptures say education should be started at the completion of 4 years 4 months and 4 days. Why have the people of today have forgotten this rule. Education should be started at the ripening of the age. Maturity first, education second. Why people are hurrying up to send their wards to school so early. In the Hathigumpha inscription in Odisha it is mentioned that Kharavela started his education at the age of sixteen. Still then he could be an emperor. But now a days people are running after modernity. What’s is modernity? What kind of modernity we have?
These are all bogus things. All we need to know the fundamentals of life. I am being woken up so early like kumbhakarna. Who was woken up before his completion of sleep. Children have longer hours of sleep than adults. But I am woken up forcibly before my sleep ends. This is very painful. But nobody understands it. Nobody understands my agony. In the school also I am overburdened. My home task is enormous. My school bag is heavier than my body weight. My mind has not matured. My body has not matured. Then why I am so over burdened ?
Now a days, people are thoughtless. Education system is thought less. I am not allowed to learn vernacular in detail. I am an westernised child. I am being indoctrinated to learn foreign languages. Mother tongue is our first language. But it is being neglated. It is unfortumate. What sort of adult I will be? Without the culture of the home soil. How can one be real human personality? All should think about it. Otherwise education will be gloomy in future.
For child education there is a brilliant example in Shakespeare’s ‘The tempest’. The main character prespero has only daughter Miranda, left in a lonely island. Prospero was the teacher of Miranda his daughter prospero was an ideal teacher. Prospero could teach what other formal teachers could not. He said-Tutors not so careful These days. Indeed now a days teachers are not careful. I expect teacher like Dr. Radhakrishnan, Thomas Arnold the famous Headmaster of Rugby High School, London. I want School Inspectors like Mathew Arnold, the son of Thomas Arnold and W.B. Yeats, the famous English poet. They were men of wide learning, outstanding personality and obvious integrity. So I expect and desire spiritual education moral education and of course, formal education.
(The views expressed are the writer’s own.)
Radhakanta Seth is a former Income tax officer in Sambalpur. He is a freelance writer and his articles have been published in some Oriya dailies like Sambad, Samaj, Dharitri, and English dailies like The Telegraph and in a sociological journal ‘Folklore’ published from Kolkata.
He can be reached at [email protected]
