COVID-19 pandemic: A new way to look at our education

Fr Stephen Touthang
Contd from prev issue
v) Covid-19 pandemic has also taught us that everyone must cooperate in order to overcome the heinous disease itself. So, our education needs to stress on cooperative learning. Learning is all about sharing. When we share, we enrich one another. You may be successful individually but if you work together with somebody, your success can be greater. If we all cooperate, there is nothing we cannot overcome. If we work together, we will be able to face problems in a better manner. With synergy we can face the hardest problems of life. Our institutions must stress on making our children to cooperate, share and exchange their knowledge and talents.
vi) Covid-19 pandemic has brought family members to live together once again.  We cannot create a good society without creating a good family. Education, first, begins in the family which taught us the values of love, sharing, joy, peace, forgiveness, and understanding. We have seen the collapse of families and eroding of family values in our times. The present pandemic is giving us opportunity to reunite with our families and share our love once again with one another. Education ultimately is to make us more human. Our institutions must help our children to sustain these basic values which the children have learnt from their families. Confucius says, “To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”
vii) Value education is the need of the hour. The saddest thing in our school curriculum today is that it does not contain any subject related to values. Moral science is teaching something but it is deemed as unimportant subject. In fact, there is no more value education in our institutions. By becoming expert in calculation, addition, subtraction, multiplication; we don’t become good or honest, sincere or forgiving. By learning different chemicals and its applications or learning the laws of motion, we don’t become compassionate or loving. This is the reason why, our institutions have produced highly qualified people with low moral values today. They have become so clever and  shrewd, that when they steal huge amount of public money, even the law courts are not able to prosecute them. They know how to twist and escape the law. This is one of the greatest achievements of our education system today. We have made them clever and shrewd but not sincere and honest. We need an education that will teach us and make us practice values.  Covid-19 pandemic has taught us that our planet is very small and all of its inhabitants are closely knitted (global village). As a result, the virus spread within a short span of time.  Therefore, all of us need to put into practice the values of love, sharing, cooperation and helping one other. 
It is possible to prognosticate that there can be a greater  and more deadly virus than Covid-19 virus in the near future that can affect the  world and destroy all of us. In such situation what would be the use having the most powerful weapons, wealth, money, status and so on? Can they give us security in such situation? We should not make the same mistake as we have done this time. What we need is global education system that will educate everyone that the whole planet belongs to all of us. It is the responsibility of each and every human being to care for our world. Fighting for a piece of land, territory, wealth, money and popularity would be meaningless.  Therefore, let us begin teaching our children how to love, how to share, how to forgive, how to be just,  how to be truthful and honest, how to live and cooperate with others, instead of teaching them to grab and hoard wealth which will make them more and more selfish. Once we have learnt these values, and put into practice the above mentioned suggestions, we would be confident to meet any challenges in the near future.

The writer is Principal of Catholic School, Canchipur