Late yesterday evening while strolling through MG Road,
Trivandrum, window shopping; I happened to me meet one of my friends, who is an
Engineer by training. The last time we met was during the wedding reception of
a family friend in May 2014. Since both of us had some time to spare, it was
not difficult to find a place to sit down and talk.
Our conversation drifted over myriad topics as diverse as
family health to the social and environmental state of past and present
Trivandrum, the opportunity cost of Governance and public administration, etc.
I shall find time to make anecdotes about various topics at a
later date. For the present, I will dwell on the essence of our conversation on
declining educational values.
Individual ambitions
and inability to work as a team led to mushrooming of discipline specific
Universities particularly in Kerala, India. Together we failed to count the
number of Universities in in Kerala. This can partly be ascribed to lack of
strong political leadership. While individuals driving these stands to gain,
students, who literally are Guinea pigs lose.
Another queer thing
that came up was the current interest in “creating
entrepreneurs”. Entrepreneurship is something that is innate. Apple, Microsoft, Alibaba, etc. and major
Indian business houses, was brought up by passionate entrepreneurs, who never
received any formal training! No wonder
it is rightly said “I was born
intelligent. Education ruined me”. The icing on this cake is also taken up
by smart entrepreneurs. There are tuition houses for this!!!!
The embedded message in
promoting entrepreneurship almost always gets overlooked. Academic houses cannot guarantee what the student will do after
graduating, the best they can do is push to see, if a student can create a job
for himself .I could learn from my friend that there is a huge difference
in approach of promoting entrepreneurship across the Atlantic.
Have we as a society
ever though the returns on these efforts? How long do we feel can we close our
eyes to reality? We are sitting on thin ice. As rightly said by Lester Brown; the
world is just one poor harvest away from chaos. There are pressing issues and
things that we can contribute to. If technology could help us print food grains,
we would have enough time to experiment.
Knowledge era has
reduced education to a commodity. However, with tomorrow will dawn wisdom.
We soon realized that we had consumed three cups of coffee
each and time was well past 8 PM. We decided to pick up the threads from where
we left next time when we meet.
It was a refreshing experience.
