{Of all lies, art is the least untrue - Flaubert}



Friday, October 15, 2004

Extended Schooling

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught -Oscar Wilde

We are all send to schools when young. With time every thing is modeled as schools. When a person grows up, he wants school-type-spoon-feeding in every sphere, and people are ready to feed him with whatever they like (or have) at every possible opportunity. Some of the times, because of this schooling all around, we may end up becoming more open to things when they come as easy as schooling rather than where we need to dig and find out. We need crystal clear, easily digestible answers whenever there exist some questions to disturb our equilibrium and this schooling comes handy.

Extended schooling should be checked, especially when it comes to some basic questions of life and its ways. Due to the inherent problem of being one-way preaching, it never leads to a healthy discussion. There are benefits of schooling at young age because it was assumed then, that all the thinking is to be done by the teacher/preacher and he/she is intelligent enough to answer our questions and honest enough to raise questions both for and against the thought. When we grow up all this good looking schooling contradicts with the basic idea of free thinking, firstly because it preaches, and secondly because it encourages us not to think (rather think in 'their' way). Its like saying " We have done all the thinking and ground work for you, you should be now ready to use and benefit from it". You may feel vindicated by outsourcing all your worries/problems and getting all the comfort, but you may indeed be comforting with some comfortable falsehood. All this brainwash of making you light and free, do cost a thing. You are living 'your' life with someone else' thoughts and prejudices.

Extended schooling is dangerous in more ways than one. It comes (or forced) to us as a friendly thing and all this disservice is done in the name of giving and receiving. This type of distributed architecture of thinking here and working there leads to slavery of very basic form, slavery of mind.

The antidote to it is to be skeptically receptive i.e. analyze before you inhale.

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