1. Children are our hope, our inspiration, our destiny. They are the kings and queens of tomorrow. The quality of the world of tomorrow is determined by the quality that children attain as students today. It is not about books, information or degrees, however desirable they may be. It is the experience and developmental input that children receive today. These would determine what they become as adults tomorrow and how they influence the world around them. It is this thought that might have prompted William Wordsworth to say, “Child is father of man.” …. It is of tremendous importance, therefore, that children grow up in the right atmosphere amidst love, affection and the right developmental messages. If they do, they grow up to be productive, happy, socially-sensitive individuals, thinkers, scientists and leaders… I certainly don’t deny that a child also has an ‘inner-self’ independent of the socio-learning environment we engulf him with, that may processes anything quite unquley to make him rise above tghem. But generally the learning and social environments have an over-riding power.

2. School is an interacting complex – an interacting complex where students, parents, community, teachers and the management partner. Success depends on how effectively the partners interact and contribute harmoniously to a common shared goal.

3. It takes time. It may go wrong. Let us persist, persevere and NEVER QUIT. We will see light at the end of the tunnel.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 – 1892) wrote:
“When things go wrong,
As they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit –
Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As everyone of us sometimes learns,
And a many a failure turns about
When he might have won had he stuck it out.
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow –
You may succeed with another blow.
Success is failure turned inside out –
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it sees so far;
So stick to the fight when you are hardest hit
It’s when things seem worst that you mustn’t quit.”

“Nothing will take the place of persistence”, observed Calvin Coolidge. “Talent will not: Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not: Unrewarded genius is a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are important.

“Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal”. It is a journey, not a destination. And it takes vision, ability and persistence.
Education is a journey, not a destination. A maze of the explored, the less explored and the grossly unexplored make the journey complex and sometimes unpredictable. Some travelers stay safe on the known; Some dare to venture. Strangely, most of those who prefer to stay safe end up being mediocre. The daring, invent and create. Their creations and inventions benefit even those who defied them. They make this world a better place to live in.
The world without Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Jiddu Krishnamurthy, Rabindranath Tagore and M.K. Gandhi would not be ‘zero’, but would be disturbingly different! And what impact would they make if they did not look beyond what they saw, hear beyond what they heard and feel beyond what they felt?!

I can hear a remote voice say that some of them had nothing to do with education! If transforming the human mind, thought and society is not education, what is it?

Education should inspire exploration and discovery. It is the means to unearth, find and ignite the wealth that lies buried deep within the individual, the society and everything else in the larger interacting complex that creates and sustains life. The unearthing should be engineered and coordinated to bring out a harmonious, productive and potent blend of their collective best. If it does not, it signals the death of education. Education is to lift man from the lowest form of existence to the highest.
Planning is an investment in ‘future’. It is like a road that leads you towards where you want to go… Just that you have to keep your options open and alternatives ready: If the chosen road gets submerged, you should still have other tangible options to sail to your destination.
Competition is good. Just that it has to be turned inward into oneself. Competition turned inward, is creative. It is constructive and productive and can bring out one’s latent best. When turned outward, competition becomes destructive. Outwardly oriented competition is a lethal weapon of self-shrinking and unproductive comparison – unconcerned, ego-centricism. Competition turned outward into others confirms our animal ancestry.… Most human miseries stem from such competition.
Degrees and qualifications do not confirm any one’s educational status, though ideally they should!. Some of our great men, great scientists and thought leaders had very little formal education! Isn’t it time to spare a little thought on the matter to reconstruct our educational vision?
. Text books are not the ‘be all and end all’ of education. They are merely means to an end – just tools to make education happen. You cannot mistake the tools to dig the well from the well itself or the water you are in search of! Confusion between the means and the end can be disastrous… We need to rescue education from the pages of our text-books.
No human being can exist in isolation. Nor can human societies. They form part of a larger reality, a much larger complex, an integral whole of interacting elements that create and sustain themselves. Education is morally bound to this reality
Schools are not places where you undertake formal studies to pass examinations. School is where you must be trained for life, where you should internalize values, learn skills, nurture inherent potentials and strengthen and harmonize your intellectual and emotional foundations without being victimised. They are not devices to stuff your brain with rote information or just learn reading writing and arithmetic. Schools must get children to explore into themselves and discover their inner treasure. They should rescue education from the pages of textbooks. Harmonizing the head and heart, fostering “whole brain thinking” and stimulating creativity and originality should be among the primary objectives of school education.
Your child is a great human being in the making. Who knows who the little wonder is: an Einstein, Picasso, Marie Curie, Abrahama Lincoln, MK Gandhi, Mother Teresa or Rabindranath Tagore! Would you take a chance?