NO FREEDOM OF CHOICE

It is true that a mother gives birth to a child, but it is equally true that the child brings with it into this world a whole new generation. It gives birth to the entire family as with its advent a family begins, a mother is born, a family evolves and the void of ageing grandparents fill up. It probably is like that in a utopian world and not the dark and despaired world that a child is born into today.

A child, no matter which family or city is he/she born into faces the deepest of challenges and violation of basic rights. There is no freedom to neither breathe free nor make his/her own choices. The world thrusts upon this blank mind its own ideas of religion and rituals, education system and to make matters worse a defined set of moral values. The ability to decide what is right or wrong shall always be the prerogative of a free mind and not one which has been fed with pre-conceived notions and ideas. Probably why, we have stopped having a second Einstein or a Tagore. In fact the previous line just shows what we have become. Our inspirations are also set and probably cannot deviate. We certainly cannot idolize a street side vendor who probably has been fighting all odds to live an honest life or a school teacher who with his/her brilliant academic records could have landed a better job but chose to live in the rural areas to help the children there a better life.

Since the day we are born to the day we die, all that we do is conform to ideas that have been propagated and moulded over the centuries and which probably hold little or no value today. Everybody seems to be talking and making bold statements about a child’s right to education but what are we aiming at? A set curriculum that a child needs to read or a given combination of subjects that we think the child needs to study so as to ensure him/her to get a befitting job later in life. Is this what education means? Well, it is more than difficult to agree to it because with the current mode of education we are only making a child “literate” per se.

Education was meant to give us an idea of how to deal with various situations in life, to help us build a conscience so as to be ensure that we leave this world a better place than the one we were born into. However, this seems to be a distant dream. I personally think that the whole energy encircling the “child rights” issue is being galvanized into a wrong direction. We need to understand what we think is a child’s basic rights. Apart from clean air to breathe, food to eat and a shelter we must provide for an environment that would be conducive to a child’s free thinking.

A child’s mind is an empty space and if we can make endeavor to give him situations where he can use his own judgment to deal with it we would in the true sense of the word give him/her “freedom”.  Then probably the generation next would not be thrusted upon with ideas that they do not believe in and inspirational poems like “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high ...” would be considered normal and not utopian.

-SRIRADHA GUPTA
MAEM (Sem I)