Questioning the canon
How many of us care to question the “question”?
Since our childhood we are overtly bred on such a system of education which does not believe in imparting knowledge so as to share it. Classroom teaching limits itself solely to the realm of the examination hall. In other words, as products of the 21st century, most of us have turned out to be “spoon fed robots”, clones of one another. The only objective of a “one-full-year’s-academic” teaching seems to be no absorption of any so called ‘knowledge’.
The power to “question” (as it were) has stopped breathing in many of us.
After (say about) 18 years of constant unhealthy and ignorant teaching, when one steps ahead into the university level, the side effects of this rickety education system slowly surfaces itself. With the handful of colleges that may (note the modal) believe in individual thought, the situation is no better. Even though students may (finally!) get a new dimension to the way they have been perceiving education; so far the larger question is- how many can (then after all) actually cope with this way of teaching where there is no spoon feeding at all? Thus, what we realise is that this kind of self-destructive teaching, lays its hands on students in a manner, that there is left a very thin veil between self doubt and failure. One fails to realise the significance of knowledge as it were.
One starts taking the given word as the word of the gospel and does not dare to refute the same. And finally when asked a simple “why” at the college level, most students find themselves in rather awkward situation. It becomes a pity to ‘witness the absence’ of any constructive thought in the 18years of a student’s existence. Consequently, most of us harbour the belief that the canon cannot be questioned. The handful of students who may have tried to question it might as well have withdrawn.
It is as though the terms “discovery” and “invention” no longer hold any relevance in our lives. An assembly line production (of humans) is now what we get. Our daily routine includes every activity required for our bodily sustenance but when it comes to thinking, most of us fall flat. While some of us very conveniently shut out any extraneous stimulus trying to reach out through the periphery of our minds; the others couldn’t have cared any less in discarding even the thought that this stimulus is a living fact!
Thanks to the exam logic, most of us grow up having learned very little of what we should-the art of thinking!
If this is what we are heading to, then what are we feeding ourselves with? Smelly cat?!?!
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