For teaching/learning experience to happen there need not be two persons but only one as in the case of Ekalavya of Mahabharata. When Mr,Ekalavya met his teacher Mr.Drona, he was asked to give his thumb as the gur dakshina and Mr.Ekalavya did what his guru has asked. The explanation for such a bizzare demand by Mr.Drona is equally fascinating. Mr. Drona being a great gur could judge/analyze the personality traits of Mr.Ekalavya and came to a conclusion that Mr.Ekalavya would not work to uphold Dharma(not religion) in times of need. In the recent spiderman movie as it was famously stated, "With great power comes great responsibility", Mr.Drona understood meaning these words which get publicity in the future. The great skills that Mr. Ekalavya possesses are a danger to the Dharma(not religion) and hence decided to curtail the skills and demanded a dakshina that ensured the required end result.
The lesson that we have to draw is that a teacher should be able to judge the student and give the required skills based on the individual calibre. But in the modern day with the need for speed and accuracy the assessment of the individual student is done by some sorts of tests and the required skills are decided by the employers and universities. Everything is averaged and normalized and within this normalized environment we seek excellence. That is the reason why greatest of inventions are achieved by people who were not considered ordinary or normal in ordinary circumstances. The relation between the teacher and student has become more professional that it has become a formality and there is no right interaction. Newer methods are being re-invented to increase the interaction in informal settings but how much of this change the course of education is anybody's guess.
Since, in this day and age we cannot have Ekalavyas in large numbers, but many great Arjunas are getting ready under able teachers to achieve greatest heights in their lives. The guru or teacher need not be the who give subject knowledge, life skills or any other guidance. The teacher is one who makes to do certain things which are good for the student in the long term and need not necessarily in the very short term. But for the student to accept a individual as a teacher, the necessary confidence has to exist in the skills and unless this confidence is built the teaching-learning will not happen as much as anticipated by both the parties.
Now the quintessential question that remains is whether teaching which includes the skills of teacher are part of the process or they form the core raw material. It is a fundamental belief that student is only a customer till he chooses the path and later he is the raw material which will be shaped according to the path and during this process process there will several steps where the conditions will not be any where near comfortable but the student has to under go them and become what he anticipated to become. In this scenario of systems approach, the student has to evolve from a post-school teen to an young adult engineer and the transformation that happens is huge.
The process of teaching or the length of the course moulds and changes the student in ways that cannot be anticipated but the efforts of all modern pedagogics is to make life of student more comfortable. If all learning that is to be accomplished was so easy, then everyone would become an Einstein but this philosophy is not good for the business. In the end, its all about money and thus everyone can aspire to become greats and hence in the end everyone is becoming a clerical idiot doing what could be accomplished even without several levels of education process. The basic need for teaching or education is completely distorted that today it is no wonder people education means getting marks in the exam and teaching means the student passing in the wrote learning exams.
The British who designed our education system has ensured that the output is only intelligent clerks and we continue to produce very good quality clerks and very few innovators. Before the advent the British, the scale and magnitude of innovation is enormous. Those who believe the ithihasas like Ramayana and Mahabharata as myths, should understand the levels of details that are mentioned in the texts and which would put to shame the modern artists of anything. The literature that exists in Sanskrit is by far the most expansive and are on a very variety of subjects. But we dissent and run away from learning the language claiming it to be a language of oppression while English what we read and write so fluently is brought to us by the real world oppressors.
We can conclude that there is no modernity in the education that we are undergoing and the education system that exists today is not the greatest. In such a scenario, it is the responsibility and internal motivation of student community to bring in a culture of inquiry and seek knowledge from non traditional sources. Apart from the motivation to seek the knowledge, it is more important to analyse the information thus collected and since the analysing skills improve over a time, it is better to take guidance from people who have better analysing skills, in our current scenario the teacher who is available at all times. The teacher can try motivate and inspire the students but the change has to happen within students. A spark has to be lit and the fuel for the spark is the fertile minds of students.
An oxymoron (usual plural oxymorons, less commonly the Latin-style oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes elements that appear to be contradictory. Oxymoronsappear in a variety of contexts, including inadvertent errors (such as "ground pilot") and literary oxymorons crafted to reveal a paradox.
