Akangjungla
More and more educational institutions in Nagaland are adapting to the new policies and schemes required for the fulfillment inorder to be registered, accredited and recognised. Even without visiting the institutions physically or becoming a part of their routine, it is pretty obvious from the measure of seminars and workshops, and projects conducted, the commemoration of various occasions, submission of data and assignments, and in like manner, the education system is becoming vast and complex. In the current context, no longer can it be assumed that education is simply about attaining certain degrees with the goal to secure employment. No longer can we also assume that the goal of education is barely for becoming adequate for livelihood. The more vast and complex the education system becomes, the more one needs to narrow down on understanding what the purpose of education is?
In every age, while admitting that the policies and system keeps changing with the understanding and hope to best suit the welfare of the students, nevertheless, the agreed-upon frame of guiding principles and instructions fail to be generally realistic and beneficial. There are rooms for making such uniform policies and suggestions more adaptable and flexible. The challenge, however, before us is that formal instruction seem effective for teaching persons about the academic subjects, and not necessarily about becoming the person they are supposed to be in order to accomplish their purpose and the vision of themselves as individuals. Learning can be achieved anywhere and it is far more than just about completing the syllabus and producing thousands of ‘educated graduates and degree holders.’ Dependency upon the theory and practical classes ascribed by the board or committee is limiting the supremacy of education.
An adequate guts for following a different system of education today, one which is contextual to the background, way of life and other specifications of Nagaland, will not only raise questions about formal learning but will push the people to ask what we uniquely have to achieve. It will reaffirm the identity, culture and thought, which will further elevate conversion around the need and requirement of the times, and perhaps create a generation who can commit their lives to new goals for individual and community. Writing on the ‘To and Fro: Education for the Art of Life’, Kathleen Gershman, an Associate Professor of Secondary Education has remarked that ‘teaching which ignores the rhythm of life is relinquishing a pedagogical tool which can make the difference between the student’s suffering through an imposed routine and transfiguring that routine into an experience of fruition. A rhythm is a “conveyance of difference within a framework of repetition” (AE 17).’ Gershman encompasses that “the reverence that qualified a true education is not for established knowledge.” The concept of education and formal education, may perhaps transform into a new paradigm to fulfill the true intention when its centrality is the individual’s growth and progress, with the welfare of the community as its purpose.
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