Oopstimism???

"Well, boys" resumed Gussie, having shot his cuffs and smirked horribly, "this is the end of the summer term and many of you no doubt are leaving the school. And I don’t blame you; because there's a froust in here you could cut with a knife. You are going out into the great world. Soon many of you will be walking along Broadway. And what I want to impress upon you is that however much you may suffer from adenoids, you must use every effort to prevent yourselves becoming pessimists and talking rot like Old Tom Travers..."

This is an extract of the speech given by a drunken Augustus Fink-Nottle, who is otherwise meek, to a class of boys of Market Snodsbury Grammar school in P.G. Wodehouse's "Right Ho, Jeeves".

Frequent reminders about optimism is a good thing, it reinforces what you believe in and reminds you of it in case you forgot about it for a moment. But what interested me here was the part about continuing to be an optimist even after leaving school. Let alone people becoming pessimists after completing their education, I am of the opinion education itself transforms them into one. Education has become more of transfer of information and less of knowledge.

This widely followed TV game show on Tamil channel where every question has upto 4-6 answers and the answers are ranked based on the responses to a previously conducted survey. One of the questions was "What makes parents proud of their children?"
The answers given by the participants were (each team has 4 people and each of them can give an answer):

• Studying well
• Winning a competition
• Getting a good job
• Achieving something

The answers were from 4 girls studying in a Law college. I was shocked at the nature of the answers since none of them was even remotely related to the character, health and good manners of the child. I was later relieved to find that respecting others was one of the right answers (whew).

The sense of competition has been fed into young minds in such a way that only winning has become everything. Later in life they tend to lose their self-esteem because they are not good enough for themselves. This turns out to be a curse especially in the corporate world. Even a good performer lacks confidence when he isn’t “the best”.

Children are born optimists; but their optimism goes for a toss with such expectations and the unhealthy competition they are subjected to. While education is supposed to prepare one for life, inculcating principles and making independent and confident human beings of them, has not even succeeded in passing “information” from the teacher to the student. More than half of this “information” one learnt at school is forgotten over time and the rest isn’t useful in any sphere of life except to may be take part in shows like "kya aap panchvi pass se tez hai?". Whether or not one has the aptitude for it, one ends up taking up jobs “to make parents proud” like the lawyers-to-be lassies said.

I am not against competition, even nature suggests competition; “survival of the fittest” is one of the laws of nature. But failure and success needs to be taken in the right stride and education needs to be more of “a putting in” than of a “drawing out”. We all talk of making the world a better place. Do we forget that the world is made of people and tomorrow’s “people” are today’s children?

Everybody has talked about it, from Albert Einstein to Abdul Kalam. Let’s hope someone listens and I hope the answers are more pleasing in some game show some time.

P.S.: I know of a social development organisation working on a different method of teaching. Can anyone enlighten me about educational institutions which use alternative teaching methods?