Education, one of the basic needs which takes after food, water, shelter, and air according to the modern human civilization. Oxford Dictionary defines education as a process of teaching, training, and learning, especially in schools, colleges or universities, to improve knowledge and develop skills. Education creates socio-cultural changes in huge magnitude. It improves the way a person appears, behaves and represents themselves in front of the society. The word education always resonates as a positive vibration for all. But it’s in a way the destruction of another; which is blind to most of us.

From time immemorial, humanity had a great craving for acquiring knowledge, and that is what makes us unique and superior to other creatures that roam the Earth. Inventing, discovering, and sharing of knowledge is what brought us here today. Knowledge is something that grows as it spreads. It helps us to understand things around the globe. It paved way for communication and socialization, traveling and now we are expanding it beyond the earth into the space and deep into the microscopic world. In every way, education and those mediums which expand it have contributed a lot in our evolution.

It's said that a coin has two faces, have we ever thought that education is going to have a dark side. But anything in the hands of humanity has a dark side, history proves it. Education in these recent centuries has turned on mankind by vicious dark minds. It divided mankind into races, slaves, rulers, dominants, etc. It taught us to discriminate people, take power and misuse it, turn people against each other. For example; in early India, there were Dalits who were denied education. For them education was something evil that separated them from the superior section of society. Education became a barrier in between their life and freedom. Education and the search for it sacrificed many lives both humans and animals.

The words education and knowledge seem very close, but they are a lot different if we dig deep. Knowledge is actually the pure form, on the other hand education is the knowledge with a political core. If we take a peek into history, the education that was provided to Indian natives by Britishers was to help them reap what was sown by the poor inhabitants. Education became a way to seed racial discrimination in the tiny-tiny minds of growing generation, by categorizing humans into fair and ugly. Government uses the academics to spread its norms and hide its insecurities. The current system of education is to make employees, a generation to be slaves for the superiors with crooked minds. They named it degree. Destroying the creative minds, they make workers for their own well-being. While we educate a community under modern system, it destroys the cultural, social identity of a particular people. It says equality, but in reality, it’s tying us up as single being like robots that lives for somebody else, without a purpose, destroying the harmony of Life.

Knowledge is to uplift humanity, preserve its socio-cultural differences and uniqueness. Education is to provide light for those who are in the dark, let them understand their surroundings, but don’t lead them, let them choose. Leading them will eventually end up taking away their identity. We are born with creative minds, embrace them, rather than forcing them to learn what they don’t want to. There should be a choice, a freedom to take the path that one chooses, may it will become the paving stone to a new era. If we don’t, in a couple of decades we will reach a point where we’ll not be different from the machines, those which are without a soul.  

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