Questions about life You know the old thing: If food is useful because it enables life, what is life useful for? And then there's the other vexing question: what is poetry for? I printed out, months ago, an interview with Sir Christopher Ricks, the Dylan-spouting ex-Oxford Professor of Poetry who is a critic, not a poet: that is to say, he is someone who sees things. The interview is in an online magazine called The Literateur; here is a paragraph-and-a-half that drew me up when I read it. Just his casual use of the word “deep” is salutary. It's not a word you hear very much these days, and certainly not in poetry circles. We enter the discussion just as Ricks is saying why he can't usefully choose a “favorite” poem by Eliot, though he does think that “Gerontion” is possibly Eliot's most finely realized poem. I don't quite see the point of, as it were, the “Balloon Game” in which you throw out from the balloon all but one poem. But I do think that ‘Gerontion' is very very extraordinary and more immediately compelling to me even than “The Waste Land.” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is superb and – this is something I've said before – as the first poem in someone's first published book of poems, it is an astonishment. I've asked people to suggest candidates for a better first poem in a first book of poems and nobody can ever think of any. So that would be the poem I suppose I would start with if I wished to persuade people much younger than I am to love Eliot. Read that poem, and particularly read it aloud. It has so much which is the best of Victorian verse in it. I think “Gerontion” – if one is playing this strangely competitive game – is even deeper than “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”… This would perhaps sound like foolish kindergarten prattle to Professor Ricks – and I know it may sound a bit rich coming from the person who translated Prufrock into Pirate – but let it be a salutary reminder to the rest of us, as we go about our days thinking about technique and words and readings and publications and all the rest of it. What are those words and techniques and readings for? Where is your plumb line? — dir.blogflux.com Woes of education Philosophy of education stems from an insight into life - from science to humanities, or from highly special education to the most elementary education; be it school education or be it the college education at the highest level. Insight stems from one's love for its history – the more we are conversant with a thing's chronological graph, the more we get involved into it. The more we involve ourselves without subjectively indulging into it, the more we objectively understand it inside out. And that is what insight is, that turns into the philosophy of education – the history of, say, mathematics along with the history of education – we must know the whole stories of the two. But we humans get indulged into life. Hence we rarely develop an insight into it. If I do not know life, how will I teach it to someone? But we coin slogans…and we prepare syllabi…and we write texts…and we appoint qualified teachers…and we preach students. We do not teach. We preach. That is what our philosophy of education is! And that is what the scene of education worldwide is! Knowledge needs no preaching. Slogans do so. How do we train our teachers? What do we equip them with? Farcically, a few formal methodologies, a faulty philosophy of education, and an insistence upon following them word by word. Experiential education that develops insight, is simply kept at bay. And then they start shooting the arrows of those slogans with the bows of these methodologies. The students sit, hit by them, without any blood out there. It doesn't hit them, where it should. The arrows are blunt, and the aim is wrong! Our texts are the most unimaginative ones. Our educational institutions are the most un-homely ones. Our philosophy of education lacks insight. And our teachers are the most uncreative ones. Online college degrees and executive education have become the trend of the day. We have started depending more on technology in education than teachers in education, but the former can never be a replacement of the latter. Department of Education needs a total revamp in each and every country on earth! Who becomes a teacher in our society? At least in India, it is the one who missed the other trains, i.e., the more luxurious ones – the one who could not hold on to some more lucrative jobs; and hence as her/his last choice, s/he married this profession of teaching s/he is now in! No one's first choice ever is teaching. No one comes here for the love and passion of it.They are all here out of compulsion of it. How will they be able to develop a philosophy of education of their own? Teaching is one of the lowest paid jobs in India at least – salaries in education are just meager; and not only that, it is one of the least respected jobs also! No father ever wants to marry his daughter off to a teacher – he searches for some revenue officer, some engineer, some doctor, some lawyer, or some businessman for that matter! So the teachers are there not by choice, but by chance of being left behind in the race of success. And these are the people for whom the uncovered truth like sex education, being immoral, is a taboo too! Also nobody thinks that physical education should first be health education and later sports education! They are going against the basic ethics in education - the unprejudiced and the objective imparting of the knowledge of un-tampered language of nature. How can they have passion for what they are doing? How will they love what they teach? How will they love whom they teach? And if you do not love – whether your subject or your student – if you do not love, you cannot teach. You simply preach. — lifesip.blog.comThe very concept of the philosophy of education has been held at ransom. Education has been turned into a farce! Not for long shall we be able to afford such bad education on earth. We need a basic education reform, like we need a basic reform in everything in life. We also need more education grants. For now, we need discussing more education news openly, reading more education quotes together, and reciting more education poems in the masses; so that we are able to develop an understanding of the real meaning of education in our lives. Of course one thing that our education system does real good to the students is that it provides them with friends for life! Do you feel things should change in life, on earth? If yes, why sit passive? Let's be in the active vanguard. Let's try to change the world! Even trying is its own fun in itself! __
