Of Education

Just like every other thing in the world, the education system has developed a great deal in the past centuries drastically. The time of 'Gurukuls' in India is long gone. Today is the day of auto-education system and state-of-the-art education technology, of projector and laptop tuitions, of rising power of spectacles and huge landslides of home-work!

But the thing that I am most concerned about is the subjects that are included in the education system today!

To begin with, I have been an ISC (Indian School Certificate) student till intermediate level, so neither am I familiar with other boards of education in India nor am I going to speak about them.

Also to make the situation familiar to my off-shore readers,(Like there are any!!), I would like to briefly illustrate the structure of the pattern of existing study system in India!

We, as science students, have to study a venomous combination of either Physics Chemistry and Mathematics (or Biology), along with Computer science (or physical education, or Hindi) and also (I-don't-know-why-it-exists!) Environmental Education and English!

Since English is and was perhaps the only thing that I have always been up to my expectations in, therefore I would like to (intentionally) 'Forget' talking about it! Hope you don't mind it!

So let's begin with Physics. It is highly and most respectfully incomprehensible to understand in the way it is illustrated in our books! I mean there are articles about how to make nuclear weapons spanning chapters and still they don't want us to join Al-Qaeda! There are questions relating high-speed-chases and heavy gunfire, but they don't want us to be violent and most un-understandably (if its a word!), there are questions relating men hanging upside down on trees, or from buildings, or from all sorts of odd places and still all they want us to do is to calculate the effect of gravitation on his head without thinking about ways of putting him down!

Still they say that physics brings 'Sense' to life! I mean, I don't know!

Chemistry, on the other hand is very lucid and easy to understand, only had any one seen those tiny little specks somebody called atoms, or had even stopped calling glucose, 6-(hydroxymethyl)oxane-2,3,4,5-tetrol! Otherwise it's an easy and potentially interesting subject!

Mathematics is another good one! Half of the questions that you do, you do because you are told to do, you don't actually have a freaking idea why on earth are you doing them! Or even if there is some use of something that you do today in any distant corner of the earth, till the time you react the reason, you forget the cause! I also like mathematics because it very straight-forward! Only exception is that you've got to study geometry to get an idea of arithmetic, and that you've got to study arithmetic to understand calculus, and then you'll have to study algebra to understand mathematics itself! Pretty Straight-forward!

Computers are good, but they are only good when somebody gives all the programs prepared to you and all the applications that use those programs and the operating system to run those applications!

Otherwise it's quite an arduous job to make even the simplest of programming codes! But I'll not talk detail here since you won't understand it... which is another way of saying even I don't understand it!

I didn't study physical education as a subject but considering all the ones who have had a go, its got nothing to do with 'physical education'; there are some complex diagrams of football fields, of heart ventricles, of diet charts, and then a few minutes play!

I won' t raise an country-wide-outrage by saying anything about Hindi as a subject, but will only say that it is a 'good' subject and that 'everyone' should study it!

Apart from all these small twinges, faults, mistakes, misinterpretations, disast... oops!, distresses, and defects; the Indian system of education, remains one of the most respected systems in the world!