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Tuesday 20 March 2012

Religious education


It is 8:00 pm on 20th march. My microprocessor lab file is due to be submitted tomorrow and I haven’t even started my work on it. Besides it is a whole night’s job so it can’t take less than a night hence I can’t start just now. Honestly it is a lot of work and I am starting to feel the pressure. Tonight’s venture is bound to crash and it feels like an opportune moment to feed my new blog, thus the name crashFed!

I woke up at 2:30 pm today as I couldn’t sleep anymore. My head was reeling from the exhaustion of the sleep and hunger from the last 18 hours of empty stomach. Mess had closed and I went to canteen for my lunch. I found Rashid there sipping an untimely tea. An hour later we were sitting in my room chatting on anything worth chatting about. It is then that this thought came to me and we discussed this for a while.

Scientific education is important and so is religious education. Science feeds the rational need of our being while religion answers the calls of our spiritual self. Both for the latter half of the last millennium have taken different course in the realm of world. My question was addressed to this. Why, when both are so natural need of ours, can’t they be put together?

The ancient Indian institution of Gurukul focused on an education in all spheres of life. In this system all education was imparted by a guru. Today in India only Madrasas impart education in a religious environment. Though the institution is important in bringing faith in religion they have a reach limited to the Muslim populace and mostly limits itself to religion. 

Since it is impractical to have different religious boards and this may also bring about mistrust among people, why can’t we provide optional religious studies in our mainstream education? By doing this we promote tolerant religious views in our students and check the rise of conflicts. This may be done in after hours of school, maybe once or twice in a week. Also the religion can be taught by religious people rather than teachers.

We must recognize that faithlessness is a serious problem in today’s world and ironically so is religious extremism. By this we can check both. Is this an interesting view? Do comment. Anyways it was a nice experience writing this first blog post and was also a fine recluse. Now it is time for me to step back into the real world and prepare for the crash, so until the next time, goodbye.

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5 comments:

  1. nicely written ,,appreciate it...
    not muchh for the first comment on the first blog..,, but would say godspeed

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    1. Thank you. You are recorded as the first person to read this blog!

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  2. Beautifully constructed. Congrats on the first post, had been waiting for it since a long time.
    Although i appreciate your views on the topic, i would also like to state that if different religious teachings are introduced into the mainstream of the educational system, it might lead to differences among the students as they might not be intellectually as mature as we would want them to be. I very strongly feel that at least at the school level, the same thing should be taught to each and every student as religion is a very delicate topic in a country as vast and as varied as ours.

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    1. I am with you on that one but I was not talking about its introduction in primary education. When we are in class 9-10 etc we are mature enough to understand. Moreover I am not talking about throwing our students in the path of religious motivators. I am talking about regulating the content of what is taught. In this way we can promote communal harmony and it may turn out to be beneficial for the nation.

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  3. Written very nicely. It's true but pretty much unaccepted by the youth. Science seemed to supress the religious beliefs..

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