Teachers’ Day: Humanness the Soul of Education

            India celebrates Teachers’ Day on September 5th. It is an occasion to ponder on our education system. The education system should help the new generation to promote love, peace, respect, and humanness. Without these values, education can produce skilled and professional monsters who hurt and kill others to satiate their evil desires and to gain power, position and wealth. The words of a Jew headmaster who survived a concentration camp are apt to reflect on Teachers’ Day; they can  inspire us. 

Hitler hated the Jews and exterminated some six million of them because they were Jews. One of the Jews who was imprisoned by Hitler could not be killed because the war ended before he could kill all the Jews. That particular Jew later became the headmaster of a school and he told his teachers the following on the reopening day of the school: “I am the survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should have seen: gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, women and babies shot and burned by high school and college students. So, I am afraid of education… My request is: Help your children to become humane. Your efforts should never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths and educated Eichmanns (Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian, one of the organizers of the holocaust). Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make children more humane.” (Indian Currents)

           Today we need to rethink our education system and examine whether it helps our children to become more humane or greedy officers, dangerous leaders and learned monsters. An effective education system makes students humane. 

 

Notes

T.M. Joseph, Making of a Noble Teacher, Indian Currents.