The Mystic Ranger

Major truth: He is truly awesome.

Or at least, so I believe. When Lock­hart said,

In fact,  if  I  had  to  design  a mech­a­nism  for  the  express pur­pose  of  destroy­ing  a  child’s  nat­ural curios­ity and  love of  pattern-making, I couldn’t pos­si­bly do as good a  job as  is  cur­rently being done.

I didn’t quite agree with him as the cur­rent sys­tem being that bad. After all, we had lost the thingie of using canes, and as the CBSE would like to believe as well, I thought we’ve come at least some way from where we’d started. When I heard my fel­low class­mates laugh­ing at that joke (unfor­tu­nately, not at me), I real­ized we’ve come absolutely no way. For all the pref­aces filled with curios­ity and sci­en­tific nature, and the unan­swered ques­tions in the book, it is rare to find some­body who real­izes that we need to learn to ask ques­tions, rather than know answers. Every step  in the edu­ca­tion sys­tem goes ahead to fill in this prej­u­dice — it is wrong to not know answers, and absurd to ask ques­tions with­out answers.

It is out duty to believe every­thing we are told is the gospel truth, jux­ta­posed with the fact that we don’t really care about it at all. Teach­ers bull­shit us about how being edu­cated is dif­fer­ent from being lit­er­ate. And the Eng­lish teacher no less — some­body who chose to study lan­guage for maybe the rea­son that she had no idea what knowl­edge really was. We aren’t ever even hinted that there is some­thing called being knowl­edge­able, which uncom­pa­ra­bly supe­rior to being edu­cated. Being edu­cated sim­ply involves being a drone. Being knowl­edge­able, gives us some right to be human.

Sim­i­larly, there’s a joke which goes on the lines of, if the teacher asks you a ques­tion, you ask her the rea­son for ask­ing — “Don’t you know the answer yourself?”

It remains as a joke, because any ques­tion dis­cussed in any place like the school, is bound to have an answer, isn’t it? What would be the point of dis­cussing some bizarre unsolved prob­lem at all?

That’s why I hate exams. I feel sick that I actu­ally used to prac­tice all the ques­tions from all pos­si­ble ref­er­ence books for Math way back in 9th. I actu­ally believed it’ll be bet­ter if I knew the answers before­hand. Even I, effec­tively, treated Math like a sub­ject worth rote mem­ory (though not as ter­ri­bly. Other wise I would’ve failed in it as badly as I did in Social Studies).

I hope I get free­dom from this won­der­ful sys­tem of cre­at­ing obe­di­ent robots called edu­ca­tion, soon. Very soon.