Modern Technological Education vs Human Values
Stories of Panchatantra, subjects like Moral Science, lessons on honesty, mercy, simplicity etc are losing their significance in the modern world.
Though unfortunate, but this is a fact that stands prominently facing us. Gone are the days of Gurukul when the student spent his Brahmacharya ashrama with his Guru learning the code of conduct of a morally fulfilling life. Success was rated as per one's humane quality. A guru could make all his students successful by making them good human beings. Success was absolute.
Today success is defined in terms of materialistic achievement. The more apartments, cars, gadgets etc one owns, the more successful and respectful he is. Success is no longer absolute but relative and therefore competitive. There is a race towards success and not everyone wins. To win, one requires the shrewdness of a business mind, the intelligence of a scientist and the hardwork of a labourer whereas moral values are optional and at times may even be a hindrance on the path of success.
Schools, parents, government and all organizations want themselves, their children, thier students, the society and the entire country to be successful, ofcourse in the modern sense. Therefore, on one hand parents pressurize children to be perfect at spoken English and on the other, the teachers want them to be mathematics geniuses. On one hand the government wants to achieve high literacy rate and on the other, the various NGOs work at different levels to raise the educational level in the backward areas. We all seem to concentrate on literacy and education where literacy is the basic knowledge of letters and education is nothing but a certificate that tells others about how much maths, science, english, history, economics etc we know. But neither is there any certificate, nor do we care about how honest, truthful, trustworthy and merciful a person is. Such values, though rare in todays world, are not precious, neither desired.
One might argue that a person doesn't get a job for being good but for being skilful. Very true. But as a society, we face the consequences of a valueless existence. We, for ourselves and our children, have planted a tree whose root is selfishness, stem is indifference, branches are mercilessness, mistrust, greed, pride, anger, intolerance and fruits are violence, terrorism, wars, dissatisfaction, alienation. A quick gaze through everyday's newspapers, tell us the story of how man has failed his fellow men inspite of the huge technological revulotion we are living in. We have created the mobile phone to keep in touch but often forget to call our relatives and friends unless we need them. We have created the rockets and satellites to reach the moon and the sun, but often fail to reach the downtrodden and the needy residing in our very own locality.
Our never-ending endeavour to reach the aliens of other planets whose existence itself is not confirmed is worth every bit of praise but then we don't care to drop a bomb and blast away huge areas and kill our fellow humanbeings who we know , not just exist but live happily with their families which may be completely dependent on them, we have created the cars and aeroplanes so that distances are no longer a hindrance in our lives and less time is required to reach far flung places, but alas, we are still so late to arrive when thousands of ethiopians starve to death in a famine or when a ship carrying medicines and food of palestanians blocked in the Gaza strip is attaked or when thousands of poor are gassed to death by an industrial negligence and cost-cutting measures of big industrialists.
Man, by his very nature, has been a curious creature who always wanted to get more and more. This curiousity led to his unimaginable success and today he has almost defeated nature by growing wheat at -40 degree celcius temperature at Verkhoyansk and creating a snow world in the hot deserts at Dubai. To make his life more and more comfortable, he made gadgets that he could enslave. He has struggled to decode the secrets of nature and used them for his own benefits. The result of all this is the technological revolution that we see all around us today. The huge reserve of knowledge that he has gathered in this process needs to be passed on to then next generation and the next and it is expected that they in turn will build upon it, a better world, a better place. Looking from outside, this story of the success and progress of mankind seem perfectly flawless. But, dig deep and we find the technological marvel that our earth is today, is built upon a base that is too weak to sustain the supersonic speed of man's materialistic achievement.
The base of anything man-made is man himself. When the basic human qualities in the man are missing, then the other things made by him can not be sustained for long. It is under such circumstances, that man who has almost replaced God in the role of creator, becomes his own destroyer. He creates life in the form of bacteria but gives death to thousands in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. He creates nuclear energy to light up his own land and uses the same energy to darken the lives of others either by dropping nuclear bombs or disposing nuclear wastes. When moral values are missing, man ceases to be himself. He becomes devilish and can go upto any extent for his greed, desire or revenge. At a microscopic level, a father can rape his daughter as we saw in a case in Maharashtra few months back, parents can kill their girl child as happens quite frequently in India, villages can get together to justify the brutal killings of young couples in love as we saw in the recent Mahapanchayat of the khaps, brothers can murder each other for property, daughter can kill her parents to marry her lover, a doctor can steal the organs of a patient for a few bucks and at a macroscopic level, a country can plunder another for access to mineral wealth, few radicals can threaten the existance of all others having different faiths, a country can completely eliminate a racial group which in a sophisticated language is called "ethnic cleansing" as happened with the Red Indians and the list goes on for there can be no end to man's cruelty when he is devoid of values.
There is nothing wrong on the part of children, schools, parents and government in wanting the next generation to be a generation of successful doctors, engineers, architects, historians, economists, accountants, scientists or writers but in our quest for successful living, we cannot afford to forget the very values which make us human. Value education should be made a compulsory part of every curriculum and it should be given due weightage. Schools should not only focus on a 100 % pass percentage and a 99.9 % marks by its toppers but also see the quality of human beings they produce. The government needs to take steps in this direction if we ever want to be a country free of corruption and crime.
We can survive quite happily without a complete generation of 100% marks getters and technological experts with the shrewdness of the likes of Warren Anderson who owned state-of-the-art industries but could easily flee without taking any responsibility of the massacre done by his company, or the cunningness of so-called successful politicians who have betrayed us at every possible steps by their deeds like arranging a safe flight for criminals. We can also survive, may be not very comfortably, without the genuine great men who discovered mobile phones, aeroplanes, microwaves etc. But we cannot survive without values for a valueless generation will not hesisate to bring about its own destruction.Our values make us human. We ought to get educated about being human first and a technological hi-fier later.
By
Aparajita Banerjee
