Testimony of a literate

Counting the wrong things

Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.

-Albert Einstein

To be somebody, who has decent education and has that education being paid off, is a wonderful feeling in itself. But education has been a term in our society, which has lost its depth. Does education mean acquiring mere a degree and go find a job? Or is it something really else?

How do we measure success? Or How do we measure how much more educated one is, in compare to another? Are grades and mark sheets the only measure that we can rely on? Or there is something more to it, yet to be explored, yet to be considered?

It is a very simple understanding that education is a process of nurturing people and illuminating them with world of knowledge, making sure that the knowledge that they acquired during the process is helping them live their life and fulfill their dreams. It is really a simple idea and it sounds very plausible to measure the quality and quantity of the knowledge that a person acquired with units like Degree and grades. That is really a very well justified argument. Without this kind of measure, there is no way of differentiating a good student from a bad one and a competent professional from an incompetent one.

I have nothing against the grading system. What I disapprove of is the way grades are measured and achieved. Isn’t it rather impertinent and unjust to student when they are expected to know everything and then they are paid for only certain portions of their knowledge? This is actually very important question, which has never been raised. As a student, everybody is expected to know everything from languages they are never going to speak to arts (like drawing); they are never going to develop.

We have to understand that not everybody can be an engineer, or a doctor, or a painter, or sports personnel. What we need to be is just one of these things and if we are interested enough and fortunate enough. If I am a good professional then it does not matter what I do. What matters most is how I do it, whatever I do. A great painter can earn far more respect and money than an incompetent doctor. It is a fact and the earliest we understand this fact, earlier we can start our journeys to excellence and inevitable joy of life.

Just imagine how many hours a student who is dreaming of being an engineer, spends learning the subjects that he/she is never going to use in their professional life. It is always good to know something about everything but it is not a good idea to teach everything about everything. That is just time disinvested. Isn’t it unjust to reflect student’s linguistic abilities in the aggregate when all he is going to use is mathematical skill when he comes out as an engineer? Or isn’t it unjust to student to measure his mental abilities on Math when he is extremely good at painting and deserves to be known as a great painter. Does it really matter if he does not know how to prove a theorem? No it does not and it should not.

A comprehensive aggregated grading system just does not bring out best from the student but actually suppresses the best inside him/her.

It is correctly said that not everything that we count these days can or should be counted and more precisely we are not counting everything that actually counts.