What
Does Education Mean?
(answers given by 2nd and 3rd standard students)
by Mother’s Service Society
Vaibhavi: Education means freedom.
Prashaanth: If we read properly, we can work and get money.
Monisha: We can later teach small children.
Candy: We can become intelligent.
Roshan: If somebody leaves us free, that is education.
Sunil: Without education, we
can’t do our business. We learn more in school.
Ilamurugu: We are coming to school so that nobody can cheat us when
we grow up. If we learn a lot, we can fool others.
D. Priyanka: We can learn many languages.
Divya: When we grow up we can become a doctor or engineer.
Ashwini: If we learn well, we can get prizes and become an
important person.
Vishnu: We can know how to do
all things on our own.
Balaganesh: When we are simply sitting in our house and we haven’t
studied, and someone asks us what is the capital of
Kaevin: We must come to school regularly.
Shobana: Education means we should be quiet.
Vishaal: We go to school to learn transport
business. We should learn how to work.
Ayush: We come to school to learn. We must not play.
Ashish: We should do all the books given by
our Miss.
Hari: Education means reading. To come to school on time.
Aparna: It means settling down in school.
Javeed: It means we learn a lot on computes
and can become a computer engineer. Education makes you brave.
Jenny:
We can become teachers.
Mihir: Education means learning more so we
can get more money.
Rhea: It means do our work
neatly. We must not take others’ things.
Shivram: Education means studying.
Comments by Appa:
The above are the responses of children which means
they reflect their parents. They are social responses. Adults of any age
or education will give the same response. That is, the child at the age of 7 is
socially conditioned. The parent cannot give a better response than this. With
respect to education no adult can give a meaningful response. The only such
response given in the above list is from a dull child, Candy, “We can become
intelligent”. What then is the real answer? How can we make the child come to
that answer by themselves? The answer is:
Education is to understand
(originally) by ourselves. One who is educated will not take any idea from
others. He will evaluate the idea for himself. To give this definition
to the child and expect him to repeat it is teaching. To teach every subject
and everything in such a way so as to let him arrive at that conclusion is to
educate him. When he is so educated, he may not be able to formulate the
answer. First he must be given the experience. Then he must be trained to
formulate what he has experienced. That is achieved when several such
experiences are given to him and he is helped to formulate.
This is a mental experience and equipment. We undergo so many experiences but at this age we have no mental equipment to formulate our experience. E.g. we buy things from the shop all the time. But we have not thought of the trade that is in existence. Trade is a system of distribution. In buying things we don’t see that we are part of a social system of distribution. We are the human individual and that completes the system of distribution.
n First we can give
him the experience.
n Giving the mental
equipment of FORMULAITON comes later. It consists of the teacher leading the
child’s mind form experience to observation, and form the observation of the
particular to the general.
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