MM Hypothesis - We don't need no education

In all of last week, did you rest your mind on the observation that, at a constant pressure, increasing the temperature of a gas will increase its volume? No? Well, have you noticed lately that, at 220 volts, the current in a circuit is inversely proportional to its resistance?

No again? What kind of ex-student are you? I have been thinking about this as parents around me are quivering in violin-crescendo, nail-biting tension, as their school-going wards go off to write their Boards, and as various college students around the country are getting into their year-end examinations: all and sundry swotting up nearly-useless bits of information like this to get 'good marks'.

The point is that there is no point to this entire rigmarole. You are about as likely to use Charles' Law or Ohm's Law in your daily life as an Eskimo wistfully perusing a bikini catalogue. We might as well be studying - and be tested on - the complete dialogues of Captain James T. Kirk in the Klingon translation, for all that this learning is actually going to matter in our daily lives here on.

Let's hear it again. We don't have an education system. We have a filtration system. We go through some 15 years of schooling, learning something irrelevant or outdated, or both - and how we do at a charade of an examination at the end of this determines where some of us will be sieved out to spend the next couple of years, learning even more irrelevant and outdated stuff in selected institutes, where the substrate that finally remains is assumed to be better-equipped to get a job and face the realities of making a living.

Yet this is a system that supposedly works, producing all these minds we're oh-so-proud of. Our Indian education system, we gloat, is among the best in the world. I shudder to wonder about systems worse than this.

Unless you are one of those microscopic few who actually work with Boyle's, Maxwell's and Kepler's Laws on a daily basis, what can one actually expect out of this process? Well, a lot of people have an insane focus on getting a job - a high-paying one, right away.

Should we rather be learning then how to find a job without waiting for the poor sods in placement to get Lehman to swoop down and blindly pay schmucks with engineering degrees and marketing qualifications large salaries to be bankers? Should we be told that less than a quarter of vacancies are actually advertised? Also, how to approach companies and create a job for oneself even if there are no vacancies? Even more basic, given the tragic quality of resumes in my inbox, should we be taught how to market ourselves in two pages?

Even the jobs our government and industry are promoting ("needed smart, intelligent MBAs to hassle poor Americans over the phone into paying their credit card bills, for a dynamic all-night call centre, transportation provided") leave much to be desired. Many of the smarter ones will eschew employment and - hopefully - start businesses of their own. Are we equipping these brave ones with the rudimentaries of entrepreneurship - how to start a company, market it, hire people and so on? From what I see out there, at best, we prepare people to be employees - not employers.

But getting a job and starting a business are just two of the things we need to be educated on. There are other, far more important facets.

Can men be taught to respect women - and not treat them as second-class citizens? Can the ladies be taught that men don't really care about how they look - only other women do - and that 120 is far more compelling if it's their IQ than their weight in pounds?

Can we be taught to work together on a project - irrespective of sex, religion or language of team members? Can we learn to speak up for what we actually believe in, and not stay in dumb obeisance just because the other person happens to be older? Can we be told it's good to have original thoughts?

We dont need no thought control

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As soon as you're born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be

There's room at the top they're telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just follow me

Calvin - Santa/God