Puns for educated minds

• How does Moses make his tea? Hebrews it....
• Venison for dinner again? Oh deer!
• A cartoonist was found dead in his home. Details are sketchy.
• I used to be a banker, but then I lost interest.
• Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes.
• England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.
• I tried to catch some fog, but I mist.
• They told me I had type-A blood, but it was a Type-O.
• I changed my iPod's name to Titanic. It's syncing now.
• Jokes about German are the wurst
• I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid, but he says he can stop any time. 
• I stayed up all night to see where the sun went, and then it dawned on me.
• This girl said she recognised me from the vegetarian club, but I'd never met herbivore. 
• When chemists die, apparently they barium.
• I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I just can't put it down.
• I did a theatrical performance about puns. It was a play on words.
• I didn't like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.
• Did you hear about the cross-eyed teacher who lost her job because she couldn't control her pupils?
• When you get a bladder infection you know urine trouble.
• Broken pencils are pretty much pointless.
• What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary? A thesaurus.
• I dropped out of the Communism class because of lousy Marx.
• All the toilets in Delhi 's police stations have been stolen. As of now, it appears the police have nothing to go on.
• I got a job at a bakery because I kneaded dough.
• Velcro - what a rip off.

The Education Prison

Image by Ben Heine

In a country with a population of over 1,200 million people it is astounding to hear from almost all employers, "We can't get the people we need".  

India has one of the youngest populations in the world, and this represents a fantastic asset, if the people are productive. However a majority of these young and middle aged people are currently unemployable. If this situation is not corrected soon then India is indeed sitting on a gigantic human resources time bomb. 

Compared to earlier generations the opportunity to acquire knowledge was a great boon for the preceding two generations, with literacy rates and job skills being greatly enhanced. 

To meet the growing demand education institutions have mushroomed mainly owned and managed by politicians. With a focus only on maximization of short term profit  most of these institutions are providing education which is often hopelessly out of sync with current requirements of employers and society in general.

Learning which should be an exciting phenomenon has become a dreary and boring affair for students. So bad is the situation that the students are forced to attend classes which they would prefer not sit in. The system has come to represent a prison of sorts.

Indian educational institutes from school to universities have mandated that every student must attend a minimum of 80% of all classes to be eligible to be examined or tested at the end of each term.

___________________________________

Why was the rule created and why is it sustained?

•   Parents do not have the time, energy or inclination to police or engage their children, they expect the educational institute to do that.  The system keeps children somewhat occupied with each other if not with their teachers and their subjects.

•   When education becomes a drudgery, because of overflowing classrooms, poor quality of content, falling teaching standards, and indifferent or overworked teachers, the children will rebel.  The education institutions see it as an opportunity to earn more fees by imposing penalties, repetitive collections of fees from detained students, etc.

This makes everyone happy except the student, because they have to endure, long boring sessions with drudgery. No prisoner is happy, even if the attempts of teaching are claimed to be for the student's benefit.

 "You can take the horse to the water but you cannot make it drink", goes a well known saying. It is possible to force the student to sit in a class but it is impossible to force them to learn.  You don't have to be a genius to know that any kind of forced action always has unpleasant or problematic results.

Instead of treating the student as a lamp to be lit, our system now considers them to be vessels to be filled.

The situation is indeed alarming but can still be rectified. We need to restructure the way we ourselves and our children learn and acquire skills more suited to meet the challenges of the 22nd century. 

Readers are invited to respond with their thoughts and suggestions.