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

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

Dopamine

Fiction Mathai went to the kitchen and picked up a glass. The TV was screening a program called Ask the Doctor . “Dopamine is a sort of hormone that gives us a feeling of happiness or pleasure,” the doc said. “But the problem with it is that it makes us want more of the same thing. You feel happy with one drink and you obviously want more of it. More drink means more happiness…” That’s when Mathai went to pick up his glass and the brandy bottle. It was only morning still. Annamma, his wife, had gone to school as usual to teach Gen Z, an intractable generation. Mathai had retired from a cooperative bank where he was manager in the last few years of his service. Now, as a retired man, he took to watching the TV. It will be more correct to say that he took to flicking channels. He wanted entertainment, but the films and serial programs failed to make sense to him, let alone entertain. The news channels were more entertaining. Our politicians are like the clowns in a circus, he thought...
11 comments
Read more

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...
6 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
12 comments
Read more