Monday, March 31, 2008

Fake Universities

This goes to all the aspiring XII standard students who have given Boards this year and seeking admissions to the best college courses.

Before applying for any university, do verify whether it is a recognized university or not. The UGC website has a released list of the universities given state-wise, dated 16th October 2007. You can visit this website http://www.ugc.ac.in/inside/fakealerts.html to go through the list. You can get more information on other educational websites as well.

Be careful, get proper information and then apply for the university. Imparting education is no longer a noble cause, its become highly commercial and a business.





A movie that made an Impact - "Hurricane"

On Saturday, I watched a very powerful and equally touching movie - HURRICANE. A mind-blowing performance by Denzel Washington. I would recommend everyone to watch the movie or read about Rubin "Hurricane" Carter.

By the way, I am not here to write a review on the movie, but wished to reflect upon the impact of education on one's mind through tough times.

The movie depicts how Carter during his tough times in the jail was fighting against his own evil thoughts. Albeit, he had suffered from racial discrimination most of his life, yet, he always quelled the thoughts that would provoke him to do anything wrong.

In testing circumstances, each one of us gets inclined to take the easy path even if it is the wrong path. That is where our education helps us in giving the confidence to choose the right path in order to sail through the rough weather.

The discrimination power between right and wrong and the confidence to stick to the right is what education provides. Education is not what we study in textbooks, it is the experiences of life that helps us mature and develop wisdom.

Strive to be educated rather than just being an information pool of facts.





Saturday, March 29, 2008

Our Education System

"Education is not given for the purpose of earning a living;
Its learning what to do with a living after you have earned it" ---------Abraham Lincoln

It took me a while to decide what should be my first post. I decided to start with the present day education system. Its utility in one's life. It's significance in nurturing one's personality.

The primary goal of today's education system seems to be earning a livelihood, nothing else. This kind of utilitarian scheme of education can help in producing people who are capable of supporting themselves economically, hopefully; but one cannot help wondering if this is all what we want.

I am not against acquiring knowledge for professional success also. It is a competitive world today. Children have to face the competition and hence, be prepared for this. But the pressure of competition has increased to this extent that right from infancy the child is fed with ideas of becoming an engineer or a doctor. A child who is still understanding his or her world around, we brain wash him or her into believing that the be-all and end-all of the learning process is to do well in examinations. These days doing well means nothing less than cent percent. Anything less than 100% is looked down upon. It is important that students are made aware of the importance of academic scores, but equally necessary is to build a foundation so that they are capable of dealing with difficult and new situations.

Our present education system lays more stress on cramming information. I will not call that information either. It is just data as everyone is so busy stuffing the child with all kinds of data that s/he is not able to develop the capacity to derive information from the vast store of data in their brains. Strangely enough, the more data we are provided with, the less well-informed we become. But who realizes that "information overload" is never fruitful.

I am still to meet real engineers, although I am surrounded by B.Techs. How many real doctors do we have around, albeit we have a crowd of doctors these days? Though there are many Ph.Ds, we have dearth of scientists in the real sense.

I will end at this note that more stress should be laid on developing the discriminating intellect to analyze the right or wrong rather than just data - overloading!!