People’s perception of success and failure is profoundly alienating. Academic boards assess us on a particular kind of Intelligence. The criteria to pass or fail are ridiculously narrow. Few of them who are lucky enough to possess that kind of intelligence required in academics are categorized as a good fit to the current world and needs.
Let’s talk about history; way back in the 6000BC when the barter system was followed you would have to have something to offer in exchange of something. I guess people then understood human intelligence better than what we do, they knew that every skill is important for the society to run smooth.
Einstein once said that ‘Everybody is a genius’ if you test a fish by its ability to climb a tree; it will believe its whole life thinking it is stupid. Here we need to understand it is not the fish’s problem that it can’t climb a tree but the person who has framed these assessments. Aren’t we putting our kids into the same rigmarole? Forcing them to learn concepts they can’t make meaning out of, or relate to. The idea of learning variety of subjects is not bad but, assessing the children and judging their individuality based on those subjects is definitely heart breaking.
Our current education system constitutes staying in the premises for 8 hours a day, conforming to best of manners with a short lunch break making everybody compete for an ‘A’ grade, a letter which determines product quality. Even scientists approve that no two brains are the same still our system treats all the students the same , imagine if a doctor prescribes the same medicine to everybody for all their problems wouldn’t the result be disastrous!
The biggest asset which distinguishes us from other living beings is the ability to think. . With our current system we are somewhere suppressing their individuality and being intellectually abusive , turning kids into robots telling them how to think and how much to think.
As our generation is a part of the same system, you would agree, we have seen friends relatives so good at certain aspects which ,the society decides as irrelevant so they eventually fail or drop out early from school. My sympathies to the schools, because I understand their difficulties too. They have a responsibility to abide by the boards and cover wide variety of subjects in a stipulated time, so we can’t blame them either. They are following tried and tested, safe methodologies to manufacture job ready best fit humans for society.
Can you judge if Leonardo da Vinci was more or less intelligent than Einstein? Difficult right! A person who can narrate an interesting story from which the next generation will learn is as competent or important as a person who strategizes a crisis-situation in a multinational company. A kid who can draw a great sketch is equally intelligent as a child who can solve complicated equations through mental math.
Why are we making these weird distinctions? Is our thinking based on how lucrative it is? So if learning bottles down to mere money making and making a living out of the education we gathered, things will become routine, mundane, monotonous, and predictable. So this means no inventions, no out of the box thinking and at the end no history to pass on to the next generation.
So the buck does not stop here … God bless kids who fit into the intelligence standards the system is looking for … but repercussions might be dangerous if it does not have a wide assessment criteria. If the system disowns these differently intelligent people as misfits they might withdraw their association from the society as a whole and turn them into criminals or loose themselves.
