“To develop a complete mind: Study the Science of Art and the Art of Science. Learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else.” – Leonardo da Vinci.
People were happy when the authorities kept the schools closed during the Covid-19 pandemic since it reduced the risk of getting infected by the deadly virus. While most of the other countries came out of most of the self-imposed constraints with a successful control of the virus, Sri Lanka is forced to continue the locked-down status due to economic and political problems of the country.
The country is virtually at a standstill due to fuel shortages. Most students feel that they are being deprived of their opportunity to learn when the schools are forced to close down in the middle of the term. Since no solution for the economic problems is in the horizon yet, one way to use this time out of school productively is to have as many learning receptors as possible open and learn whatever one can learn.
Questions
A good starting point would be to make an effort to find answers to questions such as: How did the country get to this point? And what is the earliest we can get out of these troubles, if at all we have a chance?
The goal of education is primarily twofold: to be knowledgeable about one’s own existence and to become a self-sufficient, productive, contributing member of the society by engaging the workforce. Formal education in most of the countries follows a pattern of preparing students for the workforce which is the lifeline of the economy of the country.
If the economy goes down, then the citizens of the country will place the blame on the Government and the chances of the policy makers getting elected again for the next term will also go down with it. That means the ruling elite will have to give up all the luxuries they have been enjoying. That becomes the main motivating factor for the rulers to keep the economy going well.
They have to make sure that the human resources needed for that purpose will be ready and able. In order to do that most countries, have legislation forcing each newborn to go through the country’s system of education which is designed to destroy the creativity and independent thinking of individual and promote conformity and subservient mentality of worshiping the rich, the powerful and the authority figures.
Even when one finds employment at some place, one, more often than not, feels that the employer has done him/her a favour and therefore he/she should be prepared to be a slave to that employment and/or to that employer. That is one of the reasons why most of the cases of workplace-human rights violations, such as, under compensation and labor exploitation, mental and sexual harassments go unreported and sometimes even unnoticed.
Government
Politicians use this weakness to their advantage very easily by promising people employment at Government institutions and/or other such benefits in order to secure their vote. Once in power, politicians instruct government institutions to recruit from the lists of their supporters sent directly from ministries. Some countries just use fancy words such as “lobbying” or “corporate donations” for bribing.
When someone, who has been trained and conditioned to be subservient and not have any self-confidence even to feel that he was hired for the job because of his qualifications and capabilities, is made to feel that the only reason he is employed is the generosity of his beloved politician, that person and his whole family will be voting for that politician and the particular party until they die.
In countries like Sri Lanka, one might even see some Government institutions being unfathomably overstaffed due to this reason. What is even more concerning is the fact that young people in their twenties being happy and contented with just an employment for which they are, more often than not, under paid and overqualified too.
This is one of the easier ways of manipulating the voters and it is a common phenomenon all over the world. As you can see, the continuation of this system depends mainly on making sure that the voter base consists of people who have no self-confidence, who cannot think for themselves and therefore don’t know how creative and innovative they can be.
What better way to program the voter, to accept all that, than forcing every citizen to go through an education mill, through the ages 5 – 18, which is designed to achieve exactly that?
Skills
Therefore, instead of looking at the current closure of schools as a disruption the students, teachers as well as parents would be better off considering it as an unprecedented opportunity given to learn life skills that are not normally taught through the formal education system. Perhaps people can use this time to improve their interpersonal communication skills, learn how to connect with others better, how to be empathetic.
Thinking about how the country got to this situation, students should realise that stakes are high in their duties and responsibilities in life, because the main reason for their suffering today is lack of that understanding in their parents’ generation.
There is no better time to understand that the decisions we make have real-world consequences, some immediate, and some delayed affecting ourselves and others. Students can determine that they will never abuse public funds irrespective of being employed in the state or private sector in the future.
With skyrocketing prices of essential goods and rapidly decreasing buying power of their parents’ incomes, it is important for the students to learn how to minimise their wants and needs and how to handle money responsibly. At the same time, they should learn how to take the responsibility not to overuse or waste country’s resources.
Students should understand how unethical and inhumane for some people to collect hundreds of cylinders of cooking gas and sell them back at much higher prices while their parents have been struggling for months to find a cylinder of gas to cook their food.
They should resolve not to do such things when they become responsible adults in the society. This is the best time for the students to try to understand why sometimes people will have to join certain campaigns of ‘civil disobedience’ and what their rights as a citizen of the country to do so under the constitution and within what legal parametres. Students should learn what the duties of a Police force and Military forces are and their codes of conduct towards the public so that they will know if and when a member of such a force abuse the privilege of their uniform.
Since people are inundated with all types of information students should learn how to check the authenticity of the information and act accordingly. This is also the best time for the students to learn how to exercise their freedom of expression within the legal framework of the country as well as within the accepted norms of the society.
As one can see there are a lot of other things students can learn, while they are out of school, which might even be more important than what they learn in their school programs. If they make a conscious attempt to learn these things, then they will certainly end up learning the Science of Art, the Art of Science and how everything connects to everything else.
Most of all, they will understand that the root cause of the problems they are facing today is the incompleteness or the absence of the ethical and moral value systems installed in the minds of corrupt politicians, officials, and businessmen of our country by the parents and teachers of those people.
The writer has served in the higher education sector as an academic over twenty years in the USA and fifteen years in Sri Lanka and he can be contacted at [email protected]