Education - basic or higher

I am really not sure how i should present this topic - where we should stress more - basic primary education or higher education. As government after government spend huge sum for primary education (although i don't know whether it really goes to the actual needy), let me tell you the bleak picture of our higher education. As i have come from a very backward district of West Bengal, i can at least try to give you the real picture.

i studied till 10th standard in a school which can boast of anything but good quality students. we had a strength of about 100 students at Xth standard appearing for the board examination. Out of those 100 students, just three got first class. And out of those three probably i am the only one who could break the wall of the small town to come into a life to compete with the global workforce. Now you may wonder what has happened to those unlucky 97 students who could not make it big. i can tell you very few of them have become financially independent in lives. please don't take it otherwise. i am trying to give you a statistics not to boast about myself, but the real picture of education in small towns.

so my point is all of the 100 students had got the basic education. most of them came from well-to-do families. then why is this failure in building a career out of their good basic education? hence providing basic education is not the solution, but to provide an education so that a student can earn a livelihood out of that education is the challenge.

i think we are stressing too much on just the enrollment of students at the primary schools. but it is important at the same time to see whether those students are able to earn a livelihood out of that education. making a student self sufficient so that he can earn a livelihood with his basic education should have been our motto instead of just getting the students enrolled at the primary schools. i can bet that in small towns and villages, even with education up to 10th standard in so called local schools, people end up in doing menial works.

now as we stress too much on primary education, should not we start thinking that people with good higher education can build a society where the students having basic education can be absorbed? there should be a balance between the stress given to primary education and higher education. its a different matter, although, that even with good higher education, people remain unemployable.

Education - Basic or Higher

I am really not sure how i should present this topic - where we should stress more - basic primary education or higher education. As government after government spend huge sum for primary education (although i don't know whether it really goes to the actual needy), let me tell you the bleak picture of our higher education. As i have come from a very backward district of West Bengal, i can at least try to give you the real picture.

i studied till 10th standard in a school which can boast about anything but good quality students.

Ignorance is bliss - burden of knowledge

I don't know how I should tell people about the problem of burden of knowledge. However, I think this has become a phenomenon with people thriving to aquire more knowledge. The more we know, the more we try to see the world from behind the colored glasses of that knowledge. Thats why probably we have stopped seeing the world as seen by a child with his simplicities.

To give a practical scenario of the problem, let me give you an example. If someday my wife can't lit up the gas stove of my home, i would probably try to see if there is any gas in the cylinder, then try to unscrew the burner and then lodge a complaint with the concerned person. However, i may not try to lit up the gas with an alternative lighter, say with a match box. Hence my thought processing goes from complex to more complex logical flow of events. However, my wife would probably try the last method, say try with an alternative lighter.

All of us know that we start our programming career with the Hello World problem. In a simple C++ environment it is few lines of code. However, the same poblem can be solved by applying knowledge of distributed computing, design pattern, UML and so on and so forth. May be when we start applying all these knowledge to print a simple Hello World sentence on the screen, it may not be possible for a newcomer to decipher the code.

As i was a student of Electronics & TeleCommunication engineering, i have felt it strongly that if the basic purpose of the subject of communication is lost in the wilderness of some fourier analysis and frequency domain-time domain analysis, then it does not meet the need of the education. i believe that if the purpose of subject like economics go away from the well-beingness of people to the maze of some probability and calculus equations, then the basic purpose of economy is defeated.

Hence i believe knowledge is powerful as long as it makes our life simpler; otherwise it becomes a burden. My Mom used to say one adage quite often which goes like this...

"Je Janena Uttor-Pub...
Tar janbe saday sukh..."

Thats why probably it is said that "Ignorance is bliss"......

So we must utilize our knowledge to simplify our lives or else it becomes a monster.....

I would like to conclude this discussion with the following words of wisdom from Hindu philosophy:

"
asato ma sadgamaya
tamaso ma jyotirgamayo
mrityu ma amritum gamaya
"

This means

"O Lord! take me from the world of untruth to the world of truth...
O Lord! take me from the world of darkness to the world of lights...
O Lord! take me from the world of death to the world of immortality....
"