There was a time when schools were sanctuaries,
places where children not only learned to read and write but also to think,
feel, and grow into moral beings. Today, that sanctuary feels fractured. What
once promised hope now often breeds fear, anxiety, and alienation. We read too
often about bullying, suicide, violence, and neglect within the school system.
These are not isolated tragedies, but in fact they are reflections of a deeper
national ailment, the slow death of our educational soul.
But the decay didn’t start within the
classroom walls. It began at home.
Education was never meant to be confined to
textbooks or classrooms. It begins in the earliest moments of a child’s life, in
the warmth of family, in the habits modelled by parents, in the values taught
around the dinner table. Yet, the modern household has become a space of
exhaustion. Parents are stretched thin, working tirelessly to put food on the
table. In their struggle to survive, the art of nurturing has been sacrificed
to the altar of necessity.
Among the more privileged, the problem takes
on a different form. Many believe that as long as they provide access to
gadgets, tutors, and “good” schools, their duty ends there. The upbringing
becomes transactional, where education is outsourced to institutions, empathy
delegated to teachers, and discipline left to the algorithmic influence of
digital media. But virtue cannot be outsourced, and character cannot be
downloaded.
Children now grow up with the internet as
their moral compass. They learn not through wisdom passed down by their elders,
but through trends and viral content. They mimic what they see, without the
grounding of right and wrong. The result is a generation that can code, create,
and communicate, but struggles to empathize, reflect, or apologize. They are
intelligent, but emotionally adrift, connected, but spiritually hollow.
Within schools, the crisis is equally dire.
Many teachers have become job holders rather than educators. This is not
entirely their fault, the system has conditioned them so. Teaching, once a
calling, has been bureaucratized into a career defined by key performance
indicators and endless administrative tasks. Teachers who once inspired are now
buried under paperwork and digital reporting systems, leaving little room for
genuine engagement with their students.
When passion is replaced by procedure, and
creativity is constrained by compliance, schools cease to be centres of
learning. They become factories for exam results.
The consequences are grave. A half-trained
doctor might take a few lives, but an uncommitted educator, one who teaches
without heart or purpose, destroys generations. The loss isn’t immediately
visible, but it reverberates through society, in workplaces devoid of ethics,
in public discourse devoid of empathy, and in leadership devoid of vision.
Our national discourse on education remains
trapped in shallow metrics, exam scores, rankings, and policy slogans. We
celebrate rising averages while ignoring the psychological and moral collapse
beneath. When a student dies by suicide or another is bullied into trauma, the
response is always the same, statements of concern, promises of investigation,
and silence that follows when the news cycle moves on.
The real crisis is not academic but cultural.
It is the collective surrender to mediocrity and moral detachment. We have
allowed education to be reduced to performance, not purpose. We value
efficiency over empathy, results over relationships, and prestige over
principle.
Reform, therefore, must begin not in
ministries but in living rooms. Parents must reclaim their role as the child’s
first teachers. Schools must rediscover their purpose as spaces that shape
human beings, not merely produce workers. Teachers must be freed from
bureaucratic chains and empowered to teach with passion again. And as a
society, we must redefine success, not as grades or salaries, but as the
ability to think deeply, feel compassionately, and act responsibly.
When homes lose their warmth and schools lose
their soul, a nation loses its moral direction. What we are witnessing today,
the rising violence, the emotional emptiness, the apathy, are symptoms of that
loss.
If we do not change course, we will raise a
generation that is intellectually brilliant yet spiritually bankrupt. A
generation fluent in technology but illiterate in humanity. And when that
happens, no policy reform or ministerial statement will be able to save us,
because by then, we would have already forgotten what it means to educate a
person.
Cheers.
Poignant and profound. And true.
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