FUTURE EDUCATION

Dr. ROBINSON JOSEPH

SKYLINE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE,SHARJAH,UAE

Education is one of the basic human rights. Parents strive to ensure good education that would help their children better equipped in this competitive world and gain a decent livelihood. However, good intentions alone do not make it suffice, as children will have to take moral decisions at every turn in their lives. In the long run, only that which is morally right will prevail. During the years of their development, young people need to think of values of life, which should enable them to take appropriate moral decisions.   

Our society can boast of many intellectuals with technical expertise. Many successful doctors, engineers, bureaucrats, and educationists make us proud and fill us with joy. Nevertheless, how many of them deserve the attribute of a "good person"? This is some veritable subject for thought. World is benefited only through such individuals who can be rightly called good human beings. In many areas of our society we are facing the evil fall out of an education which do not integrate the program of learning with the process of evolving good individuals. A value based educational system is of paramount importance installing the negative possibility as we see that knowledge in itself runs the risk of being misused if it is not backed by value based standards.

As English writer G.K. Chesterton once said, "Every education teaches a philosophy of life, if not explicitly, then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. If the different parts of the education do not cohere or connect with each other; if, in the end, it does not empower and transform, then, it is not education at all" A transformative education is one in which the student is incrementally invited to engage life, to reflect upon it and, then, to be of service to our world.

Education is one that helps students name their gifts, formulate their conviction, and ultimately take full ownership of their own lives. An education, then, is one that transforms students in order that they transform the world. A transformative pedagogy trains students for dialogue and conversation, providing a way to tackle the root of so many crises that face humanity today. It is also a way of bridging the divide of gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class.

There are clear moral dimensions to the economic, political, social, and environmental crises our world is currently facing. Many professional – lawyers, bankers, accountants, politicians, academics, and the entire chain of intermediaries, including religious leaders – have failed to detect the wrongdoing of our institutions; instead of exercising their moral duty, many chose the path of silence, convenience, and complicity. It is more important than ever that our students receive a strong foundation in moral discernment in order that they can act responsibly in all their relationships and pursue the common good

One of the main goals of an education is learning to live in right relationship: right relationship with oneself, right relationship with others, right relationship with God, and right relationship with our environment. Each of these fundamental relationships requires sensitivity, understanding, and care.

Education is the quest for truth. Truth is Omnipotent. The world supports itself in the strength of this Omnipresent. The denial of this truth leads to the destruction and corruption we see around the world. Value based education is the solution for this sad state of our life and world.

Education seeks to address the world in which we actually live as well as the hopes and challenges of that world. Indeed, one can view the current situation in the world against a backdrop of a whole range of key desires, really, "hungers" of the contemporary world for wholeness and peace.

 Students today appreciate having so much information at their fingertips, and yet, they long for a more robust formation that integrates their intellectual, affective and volition capacities and helps them to appreciate how the varied subjects and disciplines fit together.

Students today experience the limitation of a moral discourse that focuses almost exclusively on individual rights while almost ignoring the responsibilities we have to each other; not looking for recipes, our students display desire to acquire an ethical foundation and a method for moral discernment

The educational mission lies precisely in the study; debate, conversation, and discovery that help students identify these hungers, form their own assessment of them, and decide how they might address them for themselves and the world they seek to shape. 

We should know that the crisis our society faces in all walks of life can be related to the disorientation our educators feel in the field of Value based education. The educational system is primarily concerned with "How to make a living". It ignores the more fundamental question "How to live". Most of the innovations in educational field are concerned with acquiring knowledge and skills. But knowledge and skills, in the absence of an integrated system of values can be dangerous and suicidal. It is obvious that a sound awareness of the need for healthy components of value education in our schools and universities curriculum is an imperative if we want to bring up a generation of young people with character.  

Education, if it doesn't happen to be values based, will serve no purpose because the primary objective of education itself is and has to be nothing but value based education. Values are, indeed, certain orientations which will help one to distinguish between the right and the wrong and a capacity to accept and follow the right, while rejecting and dismissing the wrong from one's life. In this process, it is the teachers who can and who should play the key role, capturing the minds of the learners while they are young. "Catch them young" is an accepted motto.     

The four pillars of education are 1.Learning to know, 2.Learning to do, 3.Learning to live together and 4.Learning to be. Value based approach to education is embedded in all these aspects. In this context, it becomes crucial to implement values rich education in schools and colleges to guide the young's behavior and to assign meaning to their existence. The future educational system requires revamping to bring out the best in terms of superior character in the young generation.

A Chinese proverb says: "If there is nobility in heart, there will be beauty in character; if there is beauty in character, there will be harmony at home; if there is harmony at home, there will be order in the nation; if there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world."