Dear friends,
Hope you are doing well. I believe you had enough rain this past week. I was caught in a storm when I had gone out for my own affair. I witnessed the storm and it was really amazing (scary too). But we are happy that we had some rain that we needed. It might be even more than we needed. Let us try to use it.
We are in the week of the school reopening. All the children are excited to go to school after a long vacation. Some may like it to go back to school and some may not. But in any case the children are going back to school. This is the most important stage of life in everyone’s life, the stage when one goes to school. I say this because this is the stage when you open up yourself to the society. And the society welcomes you to fall in the pool of human beings with all different origins, different reasonings, different attitudes, different habits, different backgrounds, different cultures nurtured by home (parents, siblings and immediate relatives), different temperaments, different many things. This is where you meet the world. This is where our mind opens up to newer things. This is where our mind and soul start to travel in an entirely different plain. This is an integral part of education, and I see it as the most important.
This opening up is an important element in school or college, because it teaches each student to cope with the society by coping with the individual students in the class or school or college. Here is where they learn to relate with other people and they even learn the people. It is from this societal knowledge they emerge to be a better fitting component of the future society wherein they are going to live. Here is where they learn how to live in a community and they learn the values of human life. The values like giving, forgiving, asking forgiveness, sense of sacrifice, sense of charity, the meaning of brotherly love, the art of helping those in need, the culture of loving people, the knowledge of recognizing others and their views of things and many such things are learned from here. Because these virtues are the ones that make person a person.
Education in a sense of literacy is the prime purpose. No doubt about it at all whatsoever. But the literacy along with this opening up makes education a comprehensive one. Because it is this opening up that makes the mere literacy an education, otherwise a boy or a girl who comes out of the school or college without this opening up will be a machine like any other machine programmed with algorithms and statistics and information combined with them. We can not see a real complete or at least a developing human person, which would be a disgrace to the society. If the society gets filled with this kind of person, the society will not be a society but a bunch of well informed machines. It will be a terrible place to live in. It should be our hope and prayer that every college and school produce good men and women, not a bunch of ill informed senseless and heartless machines.
God bless all the kids that head towards their school (or college), and may you become the future architects of the society.
Yours sincerely in Christ Jesus,
Fr. A. Antony
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