Teachers must be humane midwives who deliver the best out of the children in school. They should stop the banking system of education where textbooks, like rupee notes, are printed in the government mint. Instead the teacher should deliver the best from the child’s brain bank

 “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time”— Thomas A Edison

Wars, they say, are fought to bring about peace! Similarly education, they say, is to transform a human being into a just, skilful and magnanimous individual. Both are laudable motives. What is the ground reality today? Wars are mostly fought for oil and education is sold to make big money. A fifteen year old student commits a premeditated murder of his teacher; Uma Maheshwari aged 39 years, meticulously executed with Agnipath precision in a Chennai school! A couple of more students commit suicide because they feared that they will not score 100% in the examination. These are just fresh in our minds. While we have all love and facilities provided for criminals, the fate of the bereaved family of two small children deprived of their mother and the husband and the parents of that dead teacher are all but forgotten in the confusion! Let us try and introspect as a society to find out where we are headed. Teachers’ jobs are going a-begging in the UK for the fear of being physically assaulted by students; the latter seems to be the norm in that country. High school students bringing their parent’s guns to school to shoot to kill their enemies and also kill at random to show their prowess used to be common in the US lately. 

Education has become a very lucrative business in India today without the hassles of other industries. Raw material comes to your doorsteps, labour problems do not exist, the finished produce needs no selling, teaching labour is cheap and available in plenty, the owner gets respectability in society, in addition in this business. It is also an ideal area to invest one’s black money and make it white! We have Cambridge schools, Presidency schools, Oxford schools, Harvard schools but no Indian schools. Come to think of it, we have no Indians in India today. We have Tamilians, Malayalis, Bengalis, Punjabis, Kannadigas, and what have you but, no Indians! This is our curse. While we used to live in our villages as large happy communities, today we live in apartment complexes which keep us apart from one another! We are building wider highways but have narrower minds; all these thanks to the present kind of education that we impart to our children who are born as pure, simple, loving, and lovable geniuses. Our schools today, according to Nobel laureate Dr Alexis Carrel, convert them into idiots! 

Right from the time of the Roman Empire changing Socrates’ educere (educe=draw forth or deliver), to educate (to develop faculties and powers by teaching, instruction, or schooling), we have been relentlessly trying to formulate our own curricula to suit our political needs on to the children. The present scenario in India is really frightening, what with the central government wanting to have supremacy over the states even to formulate the syllabus. Every new government will have its agenda and the poor kids will be the guinea pigs in their experiments. I have no reason to question Dr Alexis Carrel in our present set up. It was an old teacher in Austria, Mr Pestalozzi, who taught the cruel emperor of Russia, Czar Nicholas Alexander II that any country which does not give its young minds correct education will eventually perish. Even that cruel Czar had tears in his eyes when the old man defied his orders to convert all schools in Austria into military barracks after he defeated the Austrian army. Good schools in Europe today are called Pestalozzi’s. I am worried about our future. James Babington Macaulay would be very happy in his grave to know that what he intended to do with Indian education way back in 1835 is being implemented in India today by Indians.

According to Macaulay’s speech in the House of Commons in 1835 India had a hoary educational system that made Indians proud of their heritage and made them truthful, honest and humane. There were no cheats, no thieves, and no criminals those days, Macaulay said. It is the reverse of what we have today. What has changed in the interim period is our basic educational system of survival of the fittest with children and their parents running after the marks and ranks mirage. Even Charles Darwin has been proved wrong in his evolution theory which he based on survival of the fittest. Lamarck earlier had shown elegantly that it is the environment that makes us survive in this world and evolution is more by co-operation rather than competition. 

Lamarckism has been proven right by latest cell biological studies which have pushed our genes, of which we only have as much as a rat has (25,000 in all) to the background. Epi-genetics tells us that the genes need the environment to even show their prowess. It is the proteins produced by the genes that have the power to effect changes but the protein production by the genes is controlled more by the environment. The latter is basically the human mind (consciousness) in tune with the universal consciousness.

It is this competition for ranks and marks in the educational set up that makes us totally greedy in later life. Greed is at the root of all human ills in society today. Look at our country which has a very, very low rank in corruption in this world. Newspapers are full of details of the powers that be, who are in a queue to go to jail for corruption. I wonder if any of them can cross her/his heart to say that s/he is honest! They might get relief from law courts, but they will never get a clean chit in any ethical court. What is legal need not be ethical but what is ethical is always legal! Most of our problems today are the result of greed, mostly corporate and political greed. 

Illnesses, which are sold as going up exponentially, also start with the new grudgitis. Happy mind is the best medical insurance for a happy body. Mind is body and body is mind as physics realises now. Matter is not made out of matter; it is made out of energy, instead.  It is not the business of medical insurance that keeps you healthy but keeps the sickness industry healthy. The former would only make you a patient in the first place since any person who goes to see a doctor becomes a patient, and s/he is not supposed to become a normal person thereafter. One would do well to read this wonderful book, The Last Well Person, by a famous professor of medicine in the US—Dr Norton Hadler.

Education must follow the Lamarckian model of co-operation where the child competes with itself for excellence and not try to compete with its peers. The latter is mediocrity. Ongoing evaluation is the healthy alternative for these marks, ranks, end-year killer examination systems in schools, at least up to the tender impressionable age of fifteen. Let children have normal childhood which, if they miss, they will never ever get it back in this life. Let the child learn at the feet of the parents and grandparents, at least up to the healthy school going age of six. One is not the child of his/her parental genes. One is the product of her/his environment of which the home is more influential compared to the school. Let our homes be filled with human love, compassion, camaraderie and co-operation for the child to develop normally to make her/him a useful citizen of this world. After all, this whole world is but one large family—vasudaievakutumbakam. Take me to that world, my Lord, where human beings live and love one another as one family. 

We could certainly achieve that if we get the best out of our God like children in school. They need to be polished to get the best out of them. Teachers must be humane midwives who deliver the best out of the children in school. They should stop the banking system of education where textbooks, like rupee notes, are printed in the government mint, to be deposited in the child’s brain bank! Instead the teacher delivers the best from the child’s brain bank. Of course, to do that we must first try and get rid of universal malnutrition in our society. Malnutrition is just not confined only to the poorer sections as we think. The poor child has calorie sub-nutrition but today the children from rich households have real malnutrition, thanks to the fashionable junk food industrial efforts. All in all, children are malnourished and such children cannot be properly educated in the first place. God help mankind.

“To leave the world a bit better ...to know that one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded”— Ralph Waldo Emerson

(Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes, chairman of the State Health Society’s Expert Committee, Govt of Bihar, Patna. He is former vice-chancellor of Manipal University at Mangalore and former professor for cardiology of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, University of London. Prof Dr Hegde can be contacted at [email protected])