Schools, a Tool for Social Change

“What the hell is happening?” screamed Ambi furious over the turn of events. He had never anticipated a mass rebellion over his decision to side with Alexander the Great. What had started out as a mere opinion in the minds of students in the University of Takshashila had blown up into a full-fledged movement. This movement went on to establish one of the greatest empires the world and India in particular had/has ever seen, the Mauryan Empire.

Throughout the history of our world, we find such examples of educational institutions being origins of revolutions that changed the course of human history. People would be empowered not through laws or rights, but through a common belief that held schools high enough to achieve societal development. Today, in a world where social apathy has become the status quo, schools are just buildings producing report cards and “achievers”. Schools then were centres of change and today, of just information.

Education is key to bring about any change in our society and it is one of the most directionless aspect of our society right now. We want our kids to obtain great marks and land a job. Nobody sees a school as a place where they can actually add value to civilization itself. One school at Takshashila which hardly had over thousand students overthrew a king and stunned the largest empire of its time, the Greek. They were united in their vision for a nation of their own, ruled by their own, for their own. Schools are not just centres of learning but of societal progress. They need to move away from graduate making factories of today to institutions that lead social changes. They are the ground level centres of a people’s movement, a movement that is forever evolving and at work for eternity. We need to remember that educating the children of today leads to empowering the leaders of tomorrow and for this, we cannot and must not be satisfied with just an A+.

What we need is a forum to change the status quo. To make schools centres of social change as before, centres of our society’s struggle to achieve its true potential, centres of true learning. We cannot limit ourselves with our definitions of education because it is not a discrete aspect. A few centuries ago, “education” did not consider silica to be a world changing entity and today we have millions of people across all countries dedicating their entire lives to work on silicon chips. How would the world have turned out had the society then not considered evolving their concept of “education” to accommodate a new field? We have thousands of concept schools, some contradictory to each other but who can ever “prove” which of them is “education”? Who can ever put boundaries in time and/or space to where this “education” is obtained from? The closer we get to the answers to these questions, the further away we move from seeing education for what it is, an ever evolving living soul without boundaries whatsoever.

To sum it all up, we need to first accept that we cannot put a definition to education and stop trying to contain it in all our social structures. Second, we need to enable and empower the existing schools to open up their minds to start seeing education more holistically, in the sense that they become centres of social change limited by nothing but their imagination!