Our Poumai students being outside the state of Manipur, is not only a year or two, but over a decades and decades. We are no longer a new comer.
Normally a metropolitan city like Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai where a thousand young peoples have been studying over the past for
many years still fail to come out with the solution; Why there is a wide increase of school dropping rate in Poumai community?
Let us see.
Our society lacks having 'no-man's-land' idea in the scale of education. Without being taught to questions, we form of our own accord a connection between wanting to know and asking questions.
Our people lacks this feeling - Education is preparation for life.
'Not thoughts to repeat, but how to think' As man's knowledge developed, certain people become familiar in one sphere of investigation and these make him to keep his eye on that speculated job to earn for his enjoyment.
Where needs were being confused with wants.
Many drop their studies and join some company without knowing what is its benefits E.g. Call center, Sales men etc. which not only spoils him/her but spread this disease even to his/her younger fellow being that can likely be easily imitated and creates one of the serious barriers to true education.
Today a place like Call Center and Shopping Malls have become a main institution for Poumai youth, where most of the brilliant student who moves out from the state making several promises and commitment to their parents turns to cats and dog's money hungers and goes buried themselves with private oriented jobs.
Nothing is ever achieved in life by running away from problems and situations, which overawe us.
The child, who states emphatically that he hates cabbage without ever having tasted it, denies himself the opportunity of ever coming
to like it.
In addition, every time a cabbage forms a part of the family meal, there is a tense atmosphere caused by the parents insisting that
he must eat cabbage because it is good for him, and the child, with mounting frustration, flatly denying that he'll eat cabbage.
Consequently for the child, cabbage came to be associated with his parents' anger, just as Pavlov's dog associated the ringing of a bell with the appearance of food and a perfectly harmless vegetable becomes a high emotionally-toned for that particular child.
It is same as what we did today "When we ask what is worthwhile, we think of what is valuable".
This harmless, profit able and gain able knowledge books which will mould the real future of a person were often being put away like the child who is always denying having cabbages which is actually good for him.
The narrow attitude in one area often produces narrowness of attitude in another. E.g. infants school-teachers says that comprehensive education is nothing to do with her, or a secondary school teachers says that to study the pre-school, child is for him totally irrelevant.
In one character of Terence's plays says: 'I am a human being. I consider all human affairs to be my concern.'
Similarly the teachers and elders should consider all educational problems to be his/her concern, with thought of brotherly love irrespective of the particular institutional level at which he/she teaches or qualified.
This could be fulfilled only when a hundred hands join and march out for reformation and learn how to stand on our own feet.
Once established, it would ensure that educational problems could be solved exactly like any mathematical problems.
To resolve our difficulties, let us sit down and calculate.
pavei_hitler69 (a pseudonym) contributes regularly to e-pao.net .
You can contact the writer at pavei_hitler69(at)yahoo(dot)com .
This article was webcasted on February 15th, 2008
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