By Uddhav Srivilasan
I believe that nothing is completely correct just as much as nothing is truly incorrect. It’s in defining a statement as a mixture of both that we uncover a lie in a truth and a truth in a lie. As insubstantial as this thought may be, it is important to understand that the one thing separating a “lie” from a “truth” is that what we see. If we don’t see it, we don’t believe it. So in a really sick way, we are endlessly deceived; deceived by the very act of conforming to a collective “truth” or a collective “lie”. This is a problem that lies in our very perception of the world which in turn is dramatically affected by the way we are educated. This is a problem with the typical educational mindset of India.
Now I’m going to assume most of the readers of this article have either finished school or at the very least are in high school, because this article is going to require you to call upon your experiences thus far. Ready? Good.
Through our twelve years in school, we are taught to mug and mug and mug to the point that the only thing we believe we can trust is that which we have memorized – I find this hilarious ’cause memory is probably the least trustworthy faculty in the human mind!’. Because the only thing we can trust is that which we have memorized, we are encouraged to view the world in black and white. That which we know, and that which we don’t know. This puts us in a dilemma because we are forced to conform to a very small world – that is, the syllabus we studied under, and in today’s world, that kind of mentality will only end up hurting us when we see how large the world has become and how small we really are. Our formative years are rejected and torn apart by our college years where nearly everything that we have studied is either proven to be horrifyingly limited or just plain WRONG!
It’s a scary thought, but this is nothing new; most education systems around the world today have done nothing to curb this wide-scale ignorance and instead, choose to perpetuate our arrogant belief that the world is bound by the knowledge we possess, when in fact the knowledge we possess amounts to jack-squat. What we know today could be rejected in the blink of an eye and our entire world could be brought down by a new discovery. Granted it is basic human nature to reject that which we don’t know, that which we find different and there is absolutely nothing we can do about this awful truth. But we make this worse by dividing the world into black and white; we only conform to one side of the argument and reject the other side without even TRYING to hear what the other side has to say! Each and every one of us is guilty of this. You, me, everybody.
And as I said before, this is only made worse by the single-minded, routine education that is present in many education syllabi around the world – but especially in most Indian syllabi. There are some newer syllabi, like the International Baccalaureate, which train us to open our mind to the possibilities that lie untapped in the form of an endless imagination bolstered by a strong emotional quotient (understanding), but these syllabi are still growing and are just beginning to find a hold in countries around the world like China and India where education systems are unique for rejecting non-conformists such as myself.
