Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Is this the answer?

A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born. -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., poet, novelist, essayist, and physician (1809-1894)

Instinctively, I want to agree with this comment. Then I realise how unfair it is. This means that those with access to education will always be better off than those without. Well, for at least 2 generations at any rate. Which means that for India, if we can ensure 100% availability of primary education, it will still take 100 years before all our citizens will be more equal than they are today.

Interestingly, if we look at the rest of the world, is this theory borne out? Maybe the issue is what 'education' means. So - schooling doesn't always mean education. As endless research about the US has shown, several of their citizens (who've completed basic schooling) can't identify several US states on the map and know very little about the rest of the world. Their attitudes to other people and other countries is also not the greatest. So then, what is education? And does schooling equate at all?

Too much to think about...

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