There’s a factory close to where I live where they make canned food. As a kid, I would sit by and watch dead animals and plants and organically-grown raw stuff getting dumped on a conveyor belt from some farmhouse, or directly a killed animal (for animal products), they’d wash off all the poisonous pricks from them, clean off the little specks that got in the way of processing the product, and then they’d have huge machines process the raw grub, adding more chemicals and spices and cream, you know, to make it taste better and sometimes, to look better (yes, food needs to look good, not like a smelly roadside carcass). Then finally, they’d put all of it into small cans, and label them, ready for shipment to the markets, where you and I’d pick them up from the shelves and eat. All of the cans were the same, they had the same stuff, some sold for meat, some for dairy products, some for accessories, and the daily needs.
Now I’ve grown up, and so have those factories. Now they’re everywhere. All over the place. There’s this one kind of factory that disgusts the grub out of me. It’s called ‘tuition’. This factory produces a special kind of canned food. You dump children into the conveyor belt, and they clean off the ‘naughty habits’ and ‘irrelevant talents’, they process education into the kids, label them into different categories of jobs, and they eventually all come out in tin cans, looking and behaving exactly the same.
You see flyers at every meter of the road – coaching classes for board examinations, competitive exams for engineering, medical and law courses, why, even for higher education, like for Masters’ and PhD degrees! Why can’t one just let the kids cross the bridge without propelling them with a rocket? They have feet of their own, for crying out loud! Some people are born with talent, and some are not. Some people are meant to be a rocket scientist, and some are not. That doesn’t mean that the guy who’s not so good at math and wants to make music instead would be fed books over books of raw, intense calculus that he doesn’t even like to begin with!
There’s coaching and tuition for everything and everyone these days. Even if you’re good at something, someone who’s been tutored better (and I mean this qualitatively and quantitatively) will get way better grades than you, will get to study in a better school, will get a better job.
Everyone’s a tin-can, no different from the other one. Even if they were born different, they’re raised to be exactly the same. There’s this craze for an engineering degree in our country. Everyone has one, even if they’re a doctor, a musician, or a fashion designer. It is like an extended version of the high school education that everyone is supposed to have. They’re all fed the same information, and they are all expected to act the same, produce the same results, write the exact same answers, and all your other talents can remain latent, but you’ve got to finish school first and get an engineering degree.
Stop coaching the kids so much. Let them roam about the fields on their own. Let them come back from school and play ball in the evenings, not run into another school. Everyone is not interested in studying physics, so let them be. Don’t force them inside a tin-can just because that’s the craze in the country. Okay, I get it, at the end of the day, you have to have food on the table, and given the conditions of living in our country, having a degree ensures that. But maybe we should learn some tolerance, too. And let our country develop beyond education.
I have this friend I knew since we were both little kids, and his head and heart and soul are drowned in music and arts. He’s just finished high school, and now he’s going to an engineering college to study electronics. I only hope he’ll build a crazy new type of electric guitar, because that is the only tin-can that is labeled after his identity.
