Your contribution needed:Education related debate topic

read through boomers thread.

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2272722#2272722

Trees are green not purple, and colour inside the lines.

Here's the speech "for" the motion. Please let me know what you feel about it. Do you have any suggestions? Any remarks?


Let me tell you what Daniel Webster, one of the most revered leaders of the 20th century, said of education.

"If we work on marble, it will perish. If we work upon brass, time will efface it. If we erect temples, they will crumble to dust. But if we work upon men's immortal minds, if we imbue them with high principles, with the just fear of God and love of their fellow men, we engrave on those tablets something that no time can efface and that will brigthen and brighten to all eternity."
For Webster, education was not about imparting knowledge, not about pouring facts into minds. Instead, it was about imbuing minds with high principles, with a just fear of God, and with love of their fellow men.

I think that many of our problems have arisen because we have shied away from such lofty goals. Instead, we use colleges and universities to pour facts into people, to prepare them with a particular skill to make a living, to earn money. These are important, but more important are the high principles, the high values, the search for a meaning to their life, the fact that only through loving all men, no matter what their culture, can the world be at peace. We have forgotten that money comes and goes, while morality comes and grows.

Many people have said, in one way or another, that the chief aim of education is character. For example, the Irish poet Spencer said "education has for its object the formation of character." Plutarch said that "The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in the felicity of lighting on good education.'' It has also been said that education is not for living but for life. Yes, education will provide the skills for landing a job, but more important is the values that determine how you live your life, not how you earn your living. Abraham Lincoln expressed a ``desire to see the time when education, and by its means morality, sobriety, enterprise, and industry, shall become much more general than at present.''

Acc. to wrong diagnosis.com (note: this is a website that reports health statistics from around the world), 14.4 million people in the US are suffering from depression while India has more than 5 million depression patients, diagnosed and undiagnosed. According to a report by World Health Organization, 10 in every 100,000 people commit suicide in India every year. Madame chairperson, where is that character, perseverance and other virtues the great men have always associated with education? A good education is not so much one that prepares a man to succeed in the world, as one that enables him to sustain a failure.


Education has always been regarded as the means of developing our greatest abilities and harnessing our dreams which, when fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone. Dhirubhai Ambani and Mother Teresa had little formal education but considering their contribution to their nation and humanity in general, can we tag them as uneducated? Friends, now as you evaluate your progress as humans, do you think your education till date renders you worthy of being called "educated"? I am afraid the answer has to be a "no". (Note: I don't know if it is appropriate to incorporate such remarks into a debate speech but it does sound compelling and confident) The 21st century education can only make you engineers, doctors and lawyers but not humans - which is sadly what is expected of it.