Educated Illiterates

Yesterday, I read about an absolutely inhuman act. A person, who wasn’t ready to have kids and was unhappy about his wife getting pregnant, picked up his 4-day-old girl and threw her into a 30-foot well, killing the infant. No, we aren’t talking about any ignorant villager from a remote part of the country but about a software engineer who was working in Bangalore who visited his wife at her home in Chennai. One would expect a person who has become a software engineer to have a certain level of knowledge, but it is increasingly being displayed that while we are indeed getting more and more educated, there is hardly any increase in knowledge.

The newspaper report mentioned how this particular person didn’t want to have a kid early in the marriage. If that was the case, he should have had the knowledge on how to prevent pregnancy. That isn’t a very difficult knowledge to glean since there are multitude of products advertised across various media which helps prevent pregnancy. Wouldn’t it have been much better to resort to any of those than this dastardly step? Having gotten pregnant, the wife was reluctant to undergo abortion. If he was so frustrated with the whole situation, he could have divorced her. Of course, it is not the perfect solution, but it is a far better solution than what he thought up. Now, he will have plenty of time to ruminate on the “could have beens” while languishing in the jail.

The literacy rates in the country is definitely on the up. While there are still quite a big chunk who don’t even know to write their name, more and more people are understanding the value of education and trying to obtain it at some level. The dropout rates might be high, but children are indeed enrolling in classes. In fact, it remains a middle-class dream to see their children study hard to become engineers or doctors. Number of students who take up the common entrance tests for these courses only keep going up every year.

Such an increase in educational courses should actually be translating into increased knowledge across the country, but sadly that is not so. We still remain quite insular in our outlook, characterized even today by the way we clean our premises wherein we brush everything from our doorstep to our neighbour’s. We are yet to think about our fellowmen even as we think of how to improve things for ourselves. I see my colleagues not taking enough care to close the tap in the restrooms or littering their workstation at office. When I pointed it out earlier, they’d either give me a “don’t care” look, tell me the same outright, or give an embarrassed smile, but they go back to doing it. So, nowadays, I have stopped telling them, but I do try to close that running tap or help find litter its final destination. This is the same while we drive when all we want to do is to get to our destination at the earliest, even if it inconveniences every other person on the road. We just aren’t willing to give way. When we think about “us,” that “us” should also include the nameless faces around each one of us along with our friends and family.

It is whose responsibility to teach tomorrow’s generation on how to live? While we associate schools and colleges to learning, we should note that children tend to learn from everyone and everything around them. They grow up seeing each one of us and learning from all of us. Each time we fall short on our social responsibility, we have contributed towards our children’s ignorance. In our enthusiasm to see our children become doctors and engineers and what not, let us not forget to make them human beings.