41. Does Education empower ?

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?