The Belief in Education - Essay Example

The children were having their Hindi lessons. And the teacher was seated on a chair placed inside the broken walls. We greeted each other and the children gathered around me trying to communicate with me in whatever few English words they knew. The teacher told me, “We had a proper school until last year. But it was destroyed last year in a grenade attack. You might know that in Kashmir we are having some trouble with extremists and there was a shoot out between the army and them. Thank God, it was vacation time.

No child was hurt. But we lost the school building.” I was shocked though I knew a little bit about the situation in Kashmir. Even some of our friends had warned us not to go to Kashmir, but my father said, “What is the use of visiting India without seeing the paradise on Earth!” Our tour operator also said we could visit some safe areas of Kashmir if we insisted. “Why do you take this much risk to continue the school?”, I could not help asking the teacher, “can't the children go to some other school in a safer place?

” The teacher smiled and said, “You know, 25 years back, in this village, every house had at least one man who was with the extremists. But after this school came in 1985, we have two doctors, 13 school teachers, and one deputy collector even, all of them completing their 10th standard in this school. And we have fewer extremists. And of course, less unemployment. If this school is not functioning, the next nearby school is 35 kilometers away from here. How many of these children do you think will be able to go there?

” I bade the children and teacher goodbye and walked back to our car. Faces of impoverished child soldiers from Sri Lanka, Africa, Lebanon. that I have seen on television flashed before my mind's eyes. Hadn't their fate been different if they had the opportunity to get a proper education? Until then I had never realized the transformation that education could bring into a man or woman. As I lived in a country where there are universal education and better opportunities to avail it, education was like environment.

I was inside it and was never aware of its existence and how it molded me. Now I started thinking.