The Only Real Education

I spend my day reading and thinking about the meaning of education, about how best are people taught and liberated, can anyone ever teach anyone, is education liberating at all or is it a mere socialisation.

I read theorists who argue that teachers, academics and philosophers present knowledge as obscure and unreachable perpetuating the divide between the knower and the ignorant. I read other thinkers who want to free man, free him from the disciplinary practices that define truths for them and want man to finds other ways out of the truths that enframe him.

This restless energy sends us forth on journeys of emancipation. They are especially restless because now we are told that there is not truth to be found anyway. F celebrates the modern present in which man can invent himself again and again. With Man and not God as the center of this modern time, there are not moral bases to live life. Perhaps there never were. We then must strive to be free, but to what end!

A recent incident threw a very different light on this. In the death of a distant relative, one saw a related kind of pain and journey. At the death of a 92 year old man, his wife, who has been married to him since perhaps her teen years, is completely lost. They were both teachers in the village school, respected, disciplined and decently settled couple who lived all their life in their ancestral village home in Haryana. Their children are elsewhere and visit at intervals. The couple were traditional but close and very much in love and affectionate.

They were a couple typicial to the self-made, disciplined variety of those early 1900s in India. Their children are not like them - they are dissipated, taken to a more consumerist lifestyle. The village around them has changed over the years, overrun by nearby Delhi culture. The two teachers taught all their life. Our lady, was given to lay philosophising and also gave spontaneous talks on the Gita to women of the community. She always spoke a lot and was quite 'forward' for her times. Believing that children should do, marry as they please and study well and develop good minds and thoughts. She still thinks that way. Compelled to speak, perhaps more so now, to fill her immense pain and silence, she talks on. But now the positive and strong words, are mixed with slippages into helpless meaninglessness. The house that was kept in complete order earlier by her husband, as she sat with a recently semi-paralysed body, is now taken over by her children and grandchildren. 'Sacred' places that were not mishandled by others are now helter skelter. She faces a life that is lonlier and will most probably not be on her terms. As the village moves along, although remembering the well-regarded couple, their teachings may have borne little fruit. Perhaps some seeds lie somewhere, slowly waiting their time. But for her, for now, the teaching is turned back on herself.

"I used to give so many discourses and talks. Look now, i must give these teachings to myself now"! she exclaims. The soul in torture speaks of its own pain and its path in such clarity. But the pain remains yet.