by Sharda Patasar

Created on: July 22, 2008

In the words of a great Hindu saint, "Knowledge is not just what we acquire from books, it is what we make our own.'
Education has in the last ten to fifteen years, occupied the forefront of almost every government's agenda. Gun toting teenagers, shootings in schools, the recent marking of anti-bullying week in the UK, measures of coping with school both for teachers and students, all point to the fact that there is something drastically wrong with the world we live in today. It makes any thinking individual question the difference between civilisations past and what faces us today. But while questioning the past is healthy and will give us a view of what may be going wrong, most times it focuses on social traditions that have no place in a modern day environment. So to try to retrieve a lost world would be foolhardy when the gap between the social consciousnesses of the societies is perhaps centuries apart in some cases. Yet there is a common feature: humanity's quest for knowledge. At the heart of that quest lies the key issue, the search for happiness.

Until now, in the quest for happiness society has focussed on externalities: brand named items, modern and most up to date appliances and everything else that clutters the house! Inventions to make a fast paced life easier has only succeeded in creating a world where tension is higher, people have no time to take in the natural beauty that surrounds them when they are busy to get on to the next train that leaves in five minutes. For our children, examination success is imperative or else the money's out of your league, competition is high and everyone's basically fighting for a piece of the pie as if the world wasn't big enough to accommodate us all. The reality is that yes, money is important, having a good job that will sustain is necessary. Yet, in the midst of it all, a simple thing like common courtesy is forgotten. When technology has overtaken us to the point where there is no need to go into a bank for instance and all business can be transacted via internet or phone, how then are children to learn social skills which builds character, when the only constructive setting the school's and the church (assuming that a large proportion of us attend)? Where does the follow up take place? Where are the role models and the system that tells a child that intelligence is not marked by book knowledge but by the development of a man/woman's character?

Regardless of how much we acknowledge multiple intelligences',

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