How to differentiate education from learning

Updated on: Monday, February 06, 2012

I was at Samira’s graduation day last morning. She has just finished her schooling and awaits her final exams.

It was a sober day for the children to finally bid adieu to their institution after 14 years of education. There were the ritual rounds of speeches by authorities, student heads and teachers.

No sermonising by elders to prepare and warn children as they enter 'the big bad world'. Student heads’ reciprocated with a pun that elders need de-stress camps more than kids themselves.

School farewells are not the same what it used to be a decade ago. All this very subtly put across the change in the new order.

Schools and colleges were temples of education then. Today, institutions are commercial establishments that talk profit-loss.

And education in between. The system seeks to create more pass-outs than producing a knowledge base.

Education is packaged. It is no longer a simple learning process. Teaching the next generation to explore their minds fearlessly and to think anew of a life ahead has to be the idiom of learning. Of learning the simpler ways to expand their knowledge. To let the mind think beyond the trappings of rights and wrongs.

The debate on education versus learning is an old one. Education is the process of imparting knowledge, values, skills and attitudes. On the contrary, learning is the process of adapting knowledge, values and skills.

Education has to be acquired; learning has to come from within. Education readies you to face the world. Learning teaches you to use them at your own will; it comes from one’s individual experiences.

In a rapidly growing technology-aided world, it increasingly tells us not to learn, not to remember anything.

Technology does that for you. Education doesn’t get you world ready. It has ironically become a system of passing exams!

Application and development of the mind to remember are technology dependent. Children of today are the greatest losers.

Do we need to take pride in making this nation literate at any cost? It’s a debate that would continue and get more significant in coming times. Our learning should push for an education system that goes beyond producing toppers!

Samira, my friend’s daughter, moves out of school, and the peer pressure to excel, score marks to get into the elite colleges continue in the meanwhile.

— The writer is a fashion journalist, leading fashion consultant and an event producer actively involved with India’s fashion scene

How to differentiate education from learning

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