Skip to main content

Education without knowledge


I watched the Malayalam movie Teacher last night. It is about a young lady teacher of physical education who is raped by a group of senior students after a sports meet. The students are the state champions and the teacher’s team manages to secure the Runners-up trophy. The teacher knows that the champions’ team consists of overaged players and that is illegal. But she does not make an issue of it. The students rape her nevertheless after drugging her. Sheer selfishness, insensitivity and lack of any morality drive the students to the deed. The movie shows how the teacher brings the boys to her kind of justice since the courts of justice of this country won’t be of any help. The movie is nothing more than a revenge story with the small difference that a young and sensitive woman throws all her might against a group of younger and more strapping men. What set me reflecting is not the revenge theme but the portrayal of the young students. Have the students become as insensitive and immoral as the movie shows? I think quite many of them have.

I have noticed an alarming lack of sensitivity and moral sense among the young students these days. Furthermore, there is a lack of intellectual interests. In fact, intellectual faculties and knowledge are mocked by them. They haven’t even heard about Shakespeare or Socrates or Picaso. Since I usually mention writers in my class, when I recently mentioned Beethoven and asked whether they had heard the name, the answer was, “Yes, a writer.”

The Chairperson of Kerala’s State Youth Commission, Chintha Jerome, has been in news for quite some time now for the hilarious blunders in her PhD thesis. This morning’s Mangalam newspaper cites the example of a Malayalam professor who approached a young poet seeking the meaning of one of his most famous poems. It turned out that the professor had never read the Malayalam classics. “They were not in the syllabus” was his explanation.

The latest issue of Mathrubhumi weekly (one of the most respected periodicals in Malayalam) has the following illustration on its last page. It speaks for itself. 


Comments

  1. magiceyeFebruary 7, 2023 at 8:08 AM

    Sad state of affairs.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rajeev MoothedathFebruary 7, 2023 at 11:45 AM

    Sad, but true...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 7, 2023 at 4:19 PM

    Hari OM
    I am so far removed from the young and education of same now that I cannot properly share the observation. That said, I have noticed a decline in 'proper' grammatical usage by journalists and in other places where one might expect better - so this may be a reflection of the sort of decline you lament here. And there does, regrettably, appear to be a retrograde societal stance regarding proper conduct. Online influencers inciting young men (mostly but not all!) to heinous behaviours... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 7, 2023 at 8:20 PM

      The situation is rather bad, Yam. Many factors have contributed to the making of it. In short, we may say that it is a general degradation - in politics, religion, social institutions...

      Delete
  4. AnonymousFebruary 7, 2023 at 9:31 PM

    I agree. Not only lack of morality, sensitivity, disrespect towards elders and timeless values but also a dismal focus on making money and as quickly as possible in whichever way. They do not have any interest in gaining in depth knowledge about anything. But these are also so called professionals. Don't know whether this is failure of our education system or lack of parental upbringing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 8, 2023 at 6:19 AM

      Both, I think. The system(s) have degenerated terribly. Parental upbringing is part of that system. Parents are victims of the system too. How do you expect people to be moral in a system where justice is denied, truth is compromised, gods are manipulated...?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more