Right to Answer, but where is the Right to Ask ?

In the last month we saw the Right of Education being passed in the parliament, a big and an important step in the country’s growth. The provisions and the legalities need not concern us at this point of time. The thing to note is the fact that although it give children the right to education, the question is whether the “education” actually reaches the children or not and that I think is far more important than just making up legislations and then not working on them. Sadly, the Indian polity has a documented propensity to make legislations and not have anything concrete to state afterwards. Look at NREGA for example.

Leaving NREGA  aside and coming to RoE; it is a great step forward, but the fact remains that it cannot solve the problem that plagues our education system. Being witness to the education system and seeing it go through many changes, some for the better, some for the worse; our education system does not give us the privilege and the oppurtunity to grow and establish a liking for one subject. When you do like one subject, the others get lagged behind and then you start working on the others. Due to this, your liking to the original subject dwindles. And by the time you pass out of school, you are utterly confused

Innovation : A Holy Cow?

The other fact about the education system is that you hardly see any young innovators and inventors. The spirit of invention and innovations stems from asking one of the most important questions through human history -WHY? Only when you search for the causes do you evolve and undertake innovations. And here lies another problem- We dont have the Right to Ask. The fact is that, as many of us would have seen, whenever we have a problem to ask the teachers are either unaware or discard them with utter disdain and characterize them as the students “aggressive and indisciplined behaviour”. The right to ask is the ultimate Holy Cow of Indian education. My personal belief is that only when you guarantee a pupil’s right to ask do you actually enable him to use his mind. The education system is very characteristic of what the Indian Polity actually stands for- that we knoiw better than you and we take all decisions for you.

This is the attitude of most teachers from the old school of thought. They feel that whenever the student questions something, he is either pestering him or just wants to bide the classes’ time. Their “we are more experienced than you ” and “we know more than you” causes them to call the present generation an aggressive and a brash generation. They just don’t seem to respect the possibility that the person across the room might have a brain too. Its characteristic of the hubris and the hypocrisy that makes us Indians.

Coming to the question of innovation. Only when you ask questions will you come to acknowledge the beauty of nature and for that matter the complexities of any subject or issue. Only when Newton asked why the apple falls to the ground, did we come to know the beauty of gravity and its all-pervasive nature. The beauty of innovation and the process that leads to the innovation is bound to be marred with difficulties and obstacles. This is where another aspect of the Indian psyche comes to the fore.

In a recent Jug Suraiya article in the ToI, he says that the Indian government develops cold feet whenever it has to actually “do” something. He calls it the “can’t do” attitude of the sarkari system. And this is exactly the problem facing Indian education today.  The can’t do attitude also plagues the indian scientific establishment. What they fail to take into account is the fact that in the process of developing something, if you do actually get marred with difficulties and problems, they serve as guide to the people who want to innovate further- the 100 or the 200 ways that one shouldn’t take for the development for so and so product. Even when you don’t innovate you teach the whole of the human population the wrong ways to do something. The advantages are for all to see.

Where is the Right to Ask?

That brings us to the original question: the students right to ask. When we talk about bringing education to the most lowest classes of the society, it should aimed at creating an informed and literate populace and shouldn’t be passed away as another measure to garner votes. Even the most poor and destitute have the right to live, the right to education and most importantly the right to ask.