What is the point of school? People were better educated before schools were established!

I was pleasantly surprised that I had the highest hits for a very long time, for my last blog entry http://kalpanakaranna.blogspot.com/2016/05/education-lets-challenge-existence-of.html

While I challenged the need for schools, I don’t know if it was because of the face in the entry that the reader was drawn to, rather than the topic I have raised!

I wish to elaborate further on this topic, especially with regard to the comparisons in my area of Ratmale, Minneriya, which was a thriving farming community over 100 years ago, with the whole village scattered around the Ratmale Tank, and people were prosperous with livestock and agriculture, and some village elders even had horses that they rode in, and by all accounts a far more prosperous place than it is TODAY!

I happen to have my house, where the old village stood, right by the Tank.

http://ratmale.blogspot.com/ where the well I have dug, has water almost to the ground level in June 2016, at the beginning of the very dry season. I can truly understand why it was so prosperous, and when I look at its state of decay now, a soulless place where the young have deserted and the old wander and wonder!

None of the youth (Educated) know how to recognize the birds that live here, the trees that grow here, and the medicinal plants that can be picked up in the forest. Even worse NONE of the youth know how to weave, a product of the village in the past, where one grandmother gave me an exquisite mat about 10 years ago, the last mat she wove, before she passed away.

We have educated our youth out of their surroundings, to leave in search of employment, or remain addicted to ganja, (grown in these parts) and worse, KG, the new version called Kerala Ganja (that is imported in quantity from across the pond) , and education to them seems meaningless as it is do with concepts that are alien to them, and not relevant to how they want to earn a living. They become misfits in their own villages, where their parents can do things they cannot, and know much more than them, but have hardly been to school.

Due to the poor quality of the schools in these areas, the education they get at schools here do NOT assist them in their employment prospects, and so they are caught between a rock and a hard place, as they don’t know how to survive in their own surroundings. This is a real life situation, where neither are the kids given a taste of being able to live and work in their own environment knowing their environment, neither can they survive out side, and so become dropouts!