Explain the different components of the Education System.

Quality education for all the students involves three very important components. One is the emergence and the nurturing of life skills, not in the sense of vocational skills, but in the sense of problem-solving skills, creative and critical thinking skills, self-directed learning skills in the students. The second is the imbibing of precious values like Truth, idealism, Heroism, Perfection, Endless Progress etc.

The last component is the creation of a learning environment which enables the students to learn according to their learning needs and levels, and at their own pace. This component is the most essential for taking into effective consideration the first two components.

As everyone knows, an immense information explosion has occurred in the last two decades, and it is continuing rapidly with the increasing use of Internet. In Indian educational system, the effort till now is to compress as much information as possible in the curriculum of the students, and present it to the students in the form of textbooks, which are used as the chief or even the only source of information.

The students are expected to learn them which is an euphemism for the retention the information in the mind. Examinations are designed essentially with the view to evaluate the capacity of the students to recall this information learnt by them and to use them in the context of finding answers to the questions given.

Efforts are made half-heartedly or quarter-heartedly(!) To impart values through textbooks, through teaching and through preaching. Knowledge of these values is also acquired from books, story telling cassettes and films containing mythological stories or biographies of great men, which give to the students a vivid idea of how the values like truth, self-giving and similar values were practiced to their highest perfection. But there is no use in acquiring the knowledge about values without living them.

The two components mentioned above can be taken care of only when a learning environment is created in which the students can acquire the needed life skills and live the noble values even while learning. Let us take the values of Progress and Perfection. They are associated in the life of the student with more marks as Progress and the first rank as Perfection. In life the former is measured by the acquisition of more and more things, like money and prosperity, and by the increasing success in career and status, and the latter is measured as reaching the topmost in career and status.

This leads to competition, which, in turn, breeds ego. Real values are acquired not when they are based on ego but on the oneness of life, on the increasing feeling of others as oneself. A school can create a learning environment where this feeling is fostered, and there the students can acquire it naturally by living it in the process of learning.