On Saturday 02 Oct 2010 8:57:28 am Deepa Mohan wrote: > Well, then, Shiv, how do you feel about the way your children got educated? > Did you consider the home-schooling option? (I remember that Pooja's first > school was CALLED something like Home School?) Did you know that the option > existed?
No. The option did not exist. I believe education in India is going from bad to worse - with the education system responding to popular demand for "education" that promises to make a child either a doctor or an engineer - with those two professions being considered the best for people to "be employed" (by some nameless entity who is not given a second thought who is actually tasked with creating that employment) The British in India perturbed Indian society enough to make "traditional means of living" ineffective, but they offered an alternative to some. The "forward castes" - primarily Brahmins who traditionally had no vocational skills or family businessses to fall back upon were among the first off the mark to acquire a "British (English) education" that offered them opeining in "government service" - as clerks or accountants. The education system that was imported to India was the very system invented in Britain to recruit people in Britain to work in the colonies. But the massive loss of British manpower in World War I made it necessary to recruit more and more Indians. And goverment jobs were considered safe and lucrative. In those days (turn of the 20th century) it was fine to have a BA. Gradually the thrust of "government jobs" moved to technical fields like engneering and medicine. Your generation Deepa (and mine) turned out to be the much admired icons of success that modern India seeks to emulate at any cost. We made the doctors and engineers that everyone so admires. The Indian education syetem has responded to that by skewing the system to favor training children to try and enter medical or engineering college to the detriment of every other vocation in India. If you send your child to school in India now - you are essentially consigning him (or her) to an education system that will assume he wants to be a doctor or an engineer. Neither teachers, nor parents, nor school managements, nor the politicians know anything different. There is no escape. Failure in life is not becoming a doctor or an engineer. If things could get more stupid than this I would like to learn about it Hence my interest in any alternative system or idea in education. > > > If some are bored - tough shit. > > What is this "tough shit" that everyone talks about? You are a > gastroenterologist....tell me...if it is constipated output...why is it > considered worse than the ordinary stuff? Well ordinary shit is considered bad. Tough shit is worse. If neither of these strikes you as being extraordinarliy bad I just wonder what prompted you to want to take a discussion of home schooling to private email. Did you believe that the discussion would be worse than talking about shit of the ordinary or tough variety? shiv
