I
completed my schooling in Trivandrum in
the 1970’s. In those days, reading comics was
a passionate past time for
school-going children. One could hardly come across children without their own personal collection of comics
particularly in middle class families.
The house
I lived during my schooling was pretty spacious and was adjacent to
a compound where a Badminton
court was set up. During holidays and weekends, children from the locality
would crowd in my house with their personal collection of comics which they
keep exchanging and relish reading them before their game of Badminton. It was
a give and take punctuated with love and affection.
In the
mid eighties, my sister narrated an incident. A colleague’s family with their
children visited their uncle living in a
flat in Mumbai. There, the children befriended
other children living in the block of flats where their uncle lived. It so happened that a kid living in one of the flats offered to
give a comic book from his personal
collection to read to the children visiting Mumbai for a small fee for each comic book. When the children
rushed to their mother for money, she was quite stunned and could never come to
terms with the fact that children in Mumbai are (in her own words)
‘money-minded’!
A couple
of months ago, I was taking stock of the
list of Online publications submitted by
me for free reading. Around that time,
a friend of mine commented that
these are days the youth in their twenties
are eager to make a lot of money ... and those in their thirties never
ever part anything for free. Only those in their forties would ever show any willingness to
offer something for free!
Why do
children and the youth display a pronounced acquisitive instinct? Why do
they become ‘money-minded’? Why does our
education system fail to address this issue? I was pondering over such material
issues when I came across an article about
the effects of education miles away in America. It was entitled ‘Class
Divide Widens in School’ (Sunday Times, Trivandrum, dated 30 December 2012).
Given below is an extract:
“One of
the assumptions on which modern society is built is that education is a great equalizer; that poor
kids with access to education will be launched on a life of upward mobility.
In India, stories of poor children who
through sheer brains and hard work earned places in elite institutions and went
on to become multi-millionaires, is the stuff of legend.
This
belief was borrowed from western societies, especially America. However,
worryingly, recent evidence points to the reverse impact that education is
having: its role in enhancing class divide; of keeping the poor, poor while
making the rich, richer: In an article in The New York Times, Jason DeParle
writes about “the growing role that education plays in preserving class divisions. Poor students have long trailed
affluent peers in school performance...”
Well ...Education no
doubt is serious business...Any
comments?
