Is It True that A Man's Education Alienates Him from His Own People?

     Education is not merely the bookish education and getting certain diplomas and degrees. Education is to civilise the man and draw the best in him. It must result in his all-rounded personality, which means physically, mentally, intellectually, morally, and spiritually he is developed. So he is good in very way. He is humble, ready-witted, able to look after himself and others, can act as the occasion demands, moral and can be useful to himself and others. His wit is like a deep river moving noiselessly about but delivering his goods. In short he will be what we call a good man.


     But what do we see today? Many of the so-called educated class display a certain snoberry. They form a class apart from others. They think they know too much and they should not be found in ordinary company. They forms clubs and societies in which the ordinary man has no place. The so-called educated man at worst quote from books and papers he has read. His morals are only bookish morals.

     The fruits of his learning does not normally filter to the ordinary level. So the fruits are no more fruits since they do not reach the soil for further propagation. The snoberry is seen even among the members of a family. The son educated in college begins to look down upon his own parents and their way of life. The life in a hostel does not normally improve the character of a student. A hostel is after all a place where one pays for the services and having enjoyed certain conveniences the educated boy or girl returns home only to find things very different. He cannot adjust himself to the common surroundings since he has had a taste of the artificial. What has been said above is at least true of the developing countries. Thus the educated person finds himself an alien in his own home and familiar surroundings.


     It is not entirely the mistake of the educated. How and why they are educated is at fault. In most countries the type of education given is only to fit the student for a job, very rarely to fit him into life. So the students grow into an artificial environment. Very rarely the type of education given regenerative or creative or for that matter recreative.

     In order to overcome this lopsided development educationists from Rousseau onwards have recommended methods where the child will learn in a natural atmosphere instead of being pulled out of it. M.K. Gandhi gave his own basic way of education where the child learns everything in his natural surroundings. Perhaps it is a failure even in Gandhi's country because people have a glamour for a formal type of education in which they have been brought up. There is needed a change in the philosophy of education so that life's purpose may be made clear and the objectives or goals reached. In fact, there has been, for sometime past, some rethinking going on at higher levels in reshaping education and one hopes, not vainly, that things will improve sooner.