But any field of activity that had Arjun Singh as the Minister must consider itself fortunate that it has managed to survive at all. Arjun Singh’s biggest achievement as an HRD Minister, especially in the last few days of his office, must surely have been the fact that he managed to recall his own name without the help of any aide. He was a Minister whose chosen mode of transport was an emergency ambulance with an entourage that comprised doctors and nurses from every branch that modern medical field has known. And with a civilizational sagacity and wisdom of several thousand years, the nation handed over the task of manning the country’s education and charting the course for the youths to such a man.

Without putting too fine a point on it, Arjun Singh, in his current state when the most arduous task that he can perform in a day is to lift a handful of food to his mouth, is primed for the post of Governor, a job in which the incumbents are known to work out their calories through heavy yawning. The new man at the HRD Ministry, Kapil Sibal, looks promising, in that his companions are not from the medical profession, and also doesn’t require a fork lift-like contraption to lift him into his seat. Kapil Sibal, as you can see from his remaining grey hairs, is old and cannot be expected to have a good opinion on the education sector. He has spoken openly against board exams on the grounds they are traumatic to the students.

But Sibal has touched just the tip of the iceberg; there is a huge glacier of agony that students everywhere want to see the end of.

And we begin with:

Projects

History, as it does on all things, is not clear as to how this modern-day blight came into being. At schools, it must have been thought up by a hard-pressed teacher as an extreme measure of revenge on parents for letting their children loose on them. Spend a hour or two with a gaggle of young children, you will actually be forced to resort to things that are far more cruel.

Teachers, with an unconcern and laxness that comes only with experience, ensure that project works have no earthly connection with every-day living. ‘Advanced internet usage among Amazon tribes that have not learned to speak or write’ is understandably an extremely attractive topic for possible project work.

At colleges, like most things, it has evolved as a tradition, to amplify universe’s ultimate truth: All life is a pointless exercise.

At the school level, when they say ‘students educational project’, they obviously mean it for the parents. For, there is not even a single instance of any project work having been attempted by the student concerned. Students just announce it in the house that such and such project has been requisitioned by the school. They generally bring up the matter to the parents on the night of a Sunday, when most shops are closed, and the deadline is for the Monday morning. Children revel in such extreme brinkmanship, which on a bad day can lead to heart attacks to parent. Perhaps that may be the idea.

If Kapil Sibal can ensure the abolition of educational project works, he would have done a signal service in the removal of hideous neighbourhood ‘fancy stories’, which alone stand to benefit from these project works. Teachers can still take it out on the parents through the, albeit less cruel, method of gas chambers.

Schools and Colleges

From the days of gurukulams, where students interned with the family of the mentor to eventually emerge as complete unfeeling sages with no faith in human relationship and humanity itself, to schools and colleges, which give a strong reason for mushrooming multiplexes and malls, education has changed beyond recognition. In fact, it has transformed so much that nobody knows what it is.

For the management of colleges and schools, a major part of education involves the onerous social obligation of collecting fees and thinking up newer ways to extract from parents more money, which otherwise may be unwisely spent on needless pursuits like emergency medical treatment or setting up business establishments.

For teachers and professors, education is all about the valuable service of carefully passing on the torture that they endured as students. But for the tireless efforts of teachers and lecturers, morning shows in local cinema halls will not get to see even a single patron.

For students, it is a wonderful and exciting journey in their evolution, when they begin to understand and acquire new and specialized skills that will stand them in good stead in wasting their parents’ hard-earned money.

Schools and colleges also are the places where the students learn the art of writing crass lines as graffiti, a prowess that helps to survive in the modern technological world where they litter many forums on the internet with gross anonymous comments.

For parents, schools and colleges, in combination, help their life-long dream to see their children to eventually reach a stage when they can boldly and bravely face the gaze of the world despite the fact that they are sporting the most hideous of dresses, which is what students are called to wear on their graduation day. Were it not for the graduation-day robes, college dropout rates would be far lesser in this country.

But all things concerned, despite the merits (as mentioned above), colleges and schools deserve to be abolished, if only for the fact there wouldn’t be scope for any more Arjun Singhs to screw things up further for the nation.

And by abolishing schools and colleges, Kapil Sibal would be abolishing education itself, which is the root cause of modern evils, the chief of which should be this column.

Parents

Students, be it in school or college, can be trusted to be unanimous on one view, as to who cause them the maximum trauma: parents.  There is no bigger source of trouble for them than their parents.

Kapil Sibal, if he has the goodness of the future generation in his heart, must abolish parents.

And I can already see my daughter nodding in approval.

(This is the weekly column for my publication)

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

This was also the comfortable working pattern of most parents till one cataclysmic moment in history when all of them took a wrong turn and decided to actively involve themselves in rearing their offspring, especially in matters relating to their school and college education.  Considering the situation the world is in today, this must rank as the single biggest blunder of mankind after the invention of 24-hour news channels and employing the likes of Barkha Dutt in them.

I strongly suspect that parents of that era astutely adapted their working style from the functioning of the government. Remember how the Punjab problem was solved? Terrorists were demanding a separate Khalistan, and to drive home their idea they were killing people by the dozens almost on an hourly basis. But the government of the day was stubbornly steadfast and equal to the occasion as it went about its essential business of doing not much of anything. It is also quite possible that the government was so carefully unconcerned that it might not have even known that Punjab was festering. Eventually it came to a situation where the impassioned terrorists were simply bored with their chore that they decided to do something else which at least had a chance of eliciting response from others.

It is a plan that might as well work in Kashmir if only the authorities don’t botch it up by their overzealousness of trying to reason out with the ultras or holding peace-talks with them. If the government is faced with the question, ‘what about Kashmir issue?’ its response has to be, ‘yes, what about Kashmir? And while we are at it, where is Kashmir?’

This simple expedience will ensure that the troublemakers will shift to a place where the authorities at least know which part is where.

Getting back to bringing up children, the situation today is such that school and college education fear parents more than it possibly can the students actually undergoing them. But it wasn’t the case back then, when parents’ lifelong commitment for the education of their progeny started and ended with enrolling them in some kindergarten school. After that it was the bounden duty of the children to ensure for themselves quality education. If they didn’t, too bad. If they did, not bad. But either way, parents didn’t notice.  For, it is quite conceivable that some of the parents hardly ever noticed that they had children in the first place.  That alone can possibly explain why some of them ended up having brood whose number qualified for a special delimitation exercise and earmarking of a separate electoral constituency for them.

Parents chose the school for their child to be enrolled in after extensive and rigorous research done by way of walking down the nearby street and looking for a building with the signboard ‘school’. This was such a taxing exercise that parents were sapped of all their energy for the next 12 to 15 years and hence couldn’t make any more meaningful participation in their children’s education.

Parents and teachers meetings happened regularly whenever the duo ran into each other in the nearby market. During those moments, both the parent and teacher struck to utmost decency and etiquette by not discussing about the life and things concerning a third person who was not around —– namely, the child/student concerned.

Whenever a child didn’t go to school for a few days at a stretch, parents will niftily pick out that the child is either unwell or the school is closed for summer vacation, in which case the examinations must have been over and it is time for holidays.

Talking of holidays, parents also brought a even more wonderful laissez faire plan when dealing with summer vacation plans for their children: Since holidays were anyway fun for children, why dilute that by taking them to distant lands under the guise of vacation trips, was their essential approach. This worked wonders in limiting travel-related accidents to a minimum. This also kept at bay the emergence of new airline companies, thereby there were fewer complaints on flight delays and in-flight food, which like today, was insufferable then too.

Since every one was busy having fun and being happy doing practically nothing, history books said, peace reigned. And then, summer camps came into being. As history books would not say this, we will say: History of humankind has been altered forever.

Then there were colleges. College education, parents then understood, was very important in moulding a person’s life. It was not something that could not be treated casually. This meant parents had to remain even more hands-off than they did with school education. So parents had even lesser clue in which college and in which stream their wards were in. But diligent parents kept track off what their son or daughter was studying by noticing what they were carrying to college: If it was a steth and a hideous coat, it must be for medical. A T-Square and khaki uniform meant that an engineer or bus conductor was in the making. A single notebook and a casual demeanour was all it took for education in the science and literature groups.

The one great advantage of being in science and literature streams was that the students did not have to pay any attention to what was being taught as the subjects hardly had any relevance to real living. Fortunately for them they could all be accommodated in an organisation that continues to have no connection with reality and human condition: Government.

Governments have remained doing what they have been doing all along, which is pretty much nothing. So why did the parents change from pro-active nothingness to no purpose activeness? I blame the summer camps.

(My weekly column for the publication)

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.