Discussions on the losses in schooling

the same story ... the schooled children of the weaver will not weave. schooling has first and foremost taught them that their inherited strengths and ancient skills are worthless, and their aspirations need to be 'white collar' only. aspirations which incidentally are not reachable by most.

what are we doing to this world with our schooling ? degradeing every other community's self worth, rendering them unemployed - and strengthening our own status by making them all consider our literacy skills the most sublime.

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16Sri Devi, Padmini Natarajan and 14 others

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Jayshree Shukla In Awadhi there is a saying - thor padho to har se jao, dher padho to Ghar se jao..... Which means study a little and the plough is useless for you, study more and your village and your home will become useless for you!

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Gyan Mitra It is not the education which is flawed, but the condescending attitudes which are acquired which create contempt for activity which helped their parents and forefathers survive which is the issue. Dignity for doing anything which brings food on the table needs to be encouraged.

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Aparna Krishnan this condescension is built into the schooling which treats literacy as primary. at most, some 'liberal' schools. have a weaving class and a pottery class !

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Aparna Krishnan i have walked this path - i went to the village school in my early years. got the local potter to teach there. to 'give dignity to pottery' !! soon realied that the schooling system is structurally flawed. and that anyway schooling is also part of the larger social reality where all these are utterly devalued. ... bit by bit, i became more and more unsure of what i could do to 'help villages' ... and became a part of the village, sharing the confusions and sharing in some collective searches.

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Ekta Agarwal Education is not bad, but it is the need of the hour. However, the system of education we have today is flawed. As somebody already mentioned, it was a system created by the British to have white-collared English speaking clerks at their disposal. And to incentivise it, they made them appear superior to the other people around, such that these posts appear aspirational. And so it was, ok in the existing ecosystem, since the white collared ones were a minority and the existing ethos was not trampled upon. Over the decades, mindless propagation of those same education values has killed our ingenuity, wisdom and to some extent, our character as a nation. We were, maybe, still are, a nation with deep rooted values and wisdom, the kind of which is not easy to write in books, forget about deriving from them. Even though the Vedas, and Upanishads, and the Ramayana, and the Bhagavad Geeta, as well as the Yogas, music, dance, and other Indian art forms, existed from time immemorial, their learnings were never thought as complete unless guided by a practitioner, not somebody who did it for a living, but somebody who imbibed the same and went about it in their day to day life. Such teachers are today hard to find and replicated, easiest way is to replicate the books, without even looking at what they are trying to teach. Education, has to imparted keeping the local ethos in mind, a child should not get confused about what he sees at home, in the neighbourhood and learns at school - all three have to harmoniously blend. Till we see that harmony in education, education will be but a means of imparting literacy, which is just another skill. Education is an instrument to build character, but the instrument has to be rightly used and by the right people.

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3y · 

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Adharshila Learning Centre Education alone cannot be blamed. What about economic policies of last so many years which have systematically killed handicraft and farming. So role of a radical educationis

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Adharshila Learning Centre t is to link the education program to other peoples struggles.

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Aparna Krishnan Adharshila Learning Centre, there are two truths. At a practical level yes - schooling is here to stay, the world is dominated by a certian knowlege system, and we need to empower the others to deal with that. within that we try to inculcate other learnings like pottery and weaving, we try to integrate with people's movements ... At another level, schooling itself seems a structurally flawed concept. Which somewhere enshrines the superiority of our strengths of reading-writing over other strengths like farming and weaving. The latter, for instance, cannot fit into a 'school', no.

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Ashok Choudhary this has been the worst enemy of production in India.

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3y · 

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Aparna Krishnan how ?

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Ashok Choudhary As a Government we have never been serious in planning for the artisans and left them to compete with the bigger fishes. I have not cone across a single viable plan yet. Thats why we have prepared a plan of ourselves in Abhinav Rajasthan. Lets see how we make the plan take ground.

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Aparna Krishnan every damn programme needs to have at its base the concern of livlihoods for all. simply not there. take schooling - left, right and centre screams 'schooling for all' ... and not a soul seems to have thought about where these kids will end up. It is a mentally retarded state, or is it utter callousness of the policy makers and the powers that be.

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Aparna Krishnan A generation is there in vilage after village - rendered only fit for drink, post schooling. school has not fitted then out for any livlihoods, but has taught them successfully that their traditional livlihoods are worthless.

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Aparna Krishnan if honourable and sustainable livlihoods are made the central concern, i have a suspicsion that schools as we know them might need to be shut doen.

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Aparna Krishnan Cant and shouldnt lock up kids from 8-4. real learning happens differently.

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Aparna Krishnan anyway these are theoritical discussions... we also teach our children english and computers to try to fit them out as also-rans into the system that is. all devouring and all powerful.

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Vidyasankar Sundaresan I got into an auto in Chennai two weeks ago and got into a conversation with the driver. Turned out he came from a family of Asaaris in the Tirunelveli region. He was deeply informed about some of the most obscure stories from the Mahabharata, which his grandmother and father had related to him when he was a child, and he was essentially testing my knowledge of the epic during the trip. He had lost the art and craft of his father and grandfather, and here he was, eking out a living as a auto driver in the big city. It is not just modern education that does this to our people. It is the ongoing assault on our entire society, from all possible quarters, which has possibly become worse after Aug 15, 1947!