Do we students get enough time for

growth and development?

These things shall be;

That today’s student race;

Which ought be diligent and so wise;

Will have unknown burdens on their souls,

And signs of depression in their eyes;

On 14th of March 1879, in the dead of night, nothing sans horror and a
deathly hush could be witnessed in the streets of town Ulm, in Germany. Yet it
was the same night, when in one of the thatched cottages which fell on the left
side of the street, a Jewes bore a child with such an incongruous cast of mind
that it scarcely bore a passing resemblance to a normal human body. With the
passage of time, right from the boy's infancy to teenage, this transcendental
appearance was followed by aberrant behaviour at home and at school.
Without further ado, some local doctors were consulted for their notion about
the matter but all their endeavours turned out futile and fruitless as the boy
didn't even show the slightest signs of progress.

Some of the doctors called it dyslexia, some others named it dysmorphia and
those left labelled it dysparxia, but the fact was that these were all
assumptions and presumptions which were, for his mother, entirely beyond
the pale. A matter of perennial vexation as it was, there was something that
really haunted her and that was the boys deteriorating grades. Never in her
scariest reveries would it have flitted across her mind that the boy would one
day arrive home with his matriculation report card on which it might have
been written in bold letters..."Failed!" .Hopelessness and exasperation
overwhelmed her and as she was about to raise her hand on the innocent little
soul, her eyes froze and she kept on glaring at the remark scribbled at the
apex of the card. It was from the boy's mathematics teacher and it read.

"This boy is now capable enough to teach me

mathematics.”

This “Little wretch" as his mother had titled him is known to the world by
the name Albert Einstein, the touchstone of intelligence and rational thinking
and indisputably one of the most influential personalities in the history of
modern day science and technology. The special theory of relativity, the mass-
energy equation(E= mc2), quantum field theory and photoelectric effect are
just a few examples out of his innumerable contributions in the field of science
and especially his theories of relativity and gravitation represented a
profound advance over Newtonian physics and revolutionized scientific and
philosophical inquiry.

Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers that ever existed, was an enigmatic
figure chiefly known for his didactic teaching especially by the methods
boundless questioning and inquiry. Leonardo da Vinci an incomparable
painter, sculptor, draftsman, architect, engineer and a scientist, a personality
whose fame has remained undimmed to the present day the secret of which
rests largely on his unlimited desire for knowledge, a trait that guided all his
thinking and behaviour. Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the electric
bulb; a marvellous gift to humanity, held a world record of 1093 patents and
laid the basis of technological revolution of the modern electric world. These
are just handful examples from the bottomless list of people who played
preponderant roles in changing the past, present and future of the globe.
Were all these people exam-toppers of respective ages?” Did all of them fetch
A grades and full marks"......The actuality lies in the fact that none of the
three above mentioned had a formal schooling!

With these examples as the background let us reappraise the present day
modern education system and let the reader to gauge and put forth his/her
opinion. As a student I have I fathomed over the years that right from my
kindergarten to my present class I have been ,willy-nilly running a race , a
race of marks with my own friends and classmates and with their situation
being almost the same. "Competition" is the most frequently heard word by
my ears and if I don’t compete, I am discarded like useless wrapper which has
got no place to exist except the trash can. Theories like "Might is right" and
"Survival of the fittest" reign and I am left helpless and defenceless every
time. This is one of the pre-dominant factors of the unbearable stress that we
the students face. Stress takes no time to get converted into depression,
frustration and hypertension which further lead to suicides, drugs and other
abhorrent practices as is lucid from the everyday incidents around us.
According to a report "Students are the fastest-growing market for
antidepressants.” and studies show depression is a contributory factor to fatal
coronary disease.

"But where at all do we go wrong ?.What is the right way?” Where lies the
defect?"

The crowning defect of our existing educational system that requires the
immediate and earnest consideration is its excessive passive and mechanical
character. The student plays no active role in the attainment of knowledge.
His entire education is passive and mechanical which is, I suppose, worse than
illiteracy. Ideas thoughts and concepts are loaded on his mind which he
cannot digest; he only crams and therefore they never become his own. Our
educational system in the words of Dr. Annie Besant is just “Filling boys
heads with a lot of disjointed facts poured into the heads as into a basket; to
be emptied out again in the examination room, and empty basket carried out
again into the world.”

Further, the existing system of our education is predominantly academic and

theoretical. It is theoretical as a rule and practical by chance. The student is
taught lessons from books, but not lessons from life. In other words, he is
provided with knowledge, but not with wisdom which is just like "Receiving
food and not being able to release energy from it". He is obliged to know the
history of Greece of 200 years ago, but he knows nothing of what is happening
in our own country today. He knows more about the English country Council
than about the municipality of his own town.
Now we come to the questions of moral and cultural development of our
students. What do our institutions do for the character-building of their
students? We have to admit sadly that today there functions finishes with
imparting the students bits of information. They don’t include in them a love
of virtue and righteousness, a sense of self-respect and personal dignity.

Our students are poor not only intellectually, but physically as well. The
unsound minds live in unsound bodies. Groups of pale, thin youths meet the
eye at the portals of schools, colleges and universities. And in this regard I am
quite sure as eggs is eggs that it is so because they never are given time for
activities like sports and games and are made to think that sports and
extracurricular are useless and nothing more than a wastage of precious time
and wealth. There is hardly any provision in our schools, colleges and
universities for systematically physical training, games and sports and other
extracurricular activities. Lack of physical training leads the students to loss
in other ways too for they never learn the dignity of labour. They begin to
shun, labour of every kind, physical or intellectual. They become ideal, ease-
loving and extravagant. Even Mahatma Gandhi mourned this neglect of
physical work in our system of education.

In view of the foregoing defects and shortcomings, our system of education

calls for a radical change. One of the first and the greatest task that faces us
today is to overhaul and reconstruct our education machinery, for it is on the
regeneration of our education machinery that the regeneration of the nation
depends. We have to devise as-early-as possible as comprehensive national
scheme of education which seeks to brings about a complete and harmonious
development of all factors of human personality.