The most wonderful time of one's life is not childhood - me thinks. For there, one is only being presented the world. The best time is when one can look at the world and say - hey, that pleases me and I'd like to spend my life doing it. That is youth. You. Between the ages of 14 and 20 when life is opening itself. When life is talking of potentials and possibilities. When life is posing a series of choices and is allowing sneak previews of the world you'd like to create for yourself. When you can make life go slow by sitting by yourself and contemplate or sit with friends and talk politics or sit with people older in a profession and learn from them. Whatever the choice, life is quite ready to wait for you. Life itself is not in a rush. You will always have time to accomplish. Ceiling of time is manmade and those who have accomplished will tell you two things: they never accepted rules made by other men as their own. They never believed in time and they believed in themselves. They had a dream and they pursued it until it became a reality. And when such dreams become a reality the world takes notice and changes itself. Look at Edison or Florence Nightingale or Helen Keller.

That students must spend hours learning what every great man has said, but not how he applied his ideas in his own life, which is what makes any learning relevant.

Are there non formal discussions among teacher and taught? Are youngsters - you - allowed to question every theory, every accepted notion and see for yourselves whether the theories still hold good irrespective of the subject or the authority being challenged. Are there hot discussions over a forgotten cup of tea in the University campus that can produce true results? I think these issues are as important as dress code if not more.

The best day would be when students strike to be given the freedom to THINK; when students say that reading, working part time on a project or watching a good movie, playing a game seriously is as important as sitting through lectures; when students insist that exams have two kinds of questions where a smaller percentage will be on the history of the subject including what all the greats have said and a larger percentage on questions where they'd be awarded marks for original thinking and not for quoting and rewriting A.C.Bradley or Malthus or Pavlov. After all the Great became so, because they questioned. Every invention or discovery has come about because when the inventor was young, the mind recognised a challenge. The person then spent a life time in quiet contemplation and made a quantum leap to discover the elusive answer.

Education is when you demand the space to be, the time to look around, when you see a challenge and you look for possible answers. When that happens as a norm, Universities would be a place to go to learn how to think, how to theorise, how to postulate, which was the original intention of such places of learning.

how you are being led. The time has come to question why you are being led and whether you should be led. The time has come for you to decide whether at all you want an education that considers neither your potential nor the market requirement when you finish your courses.

For long now I have wondered what would happen if you said, when you finish your pre-university course, that you wanted to take a year off? And make it the most precious year of your life. Travel, meet people from many walks of life, see how they function, be with them, work with them as an assistant even if it is only to download mail, keep the work place neat and ready, or brush the dogs - not a simple chore if you wish to become a vet - in exchange of learning the real issues of a few possible professions. So that at the end of the year you know for yourself what you want to do all your life. See then how life changes.

You choose a course as a thinking person. A person who has an idea of the challenges that wait to be addressed. A person who knows how to connect the course and the world outside. Can you imagine what fun there would be in learning then? The sheer passion would perhaps bring answers to your mind even before you leave the University. And when the mind is so free, so fresh, so full of life who would dare dictate what you may or may not do. You would be your own maker. You make your own destiny.

I am not saying this from the top of my hat. My daughter is home schooled. She is 17; she has a published book to her name and she represented our school at the International Democracy in Education Conference in Berlin this year. She is taking the year off as an exchange student in Europe to see what she would like to do with herself. I am glad that such opportunities are possible today. And when opportunities knock be bold and take them on.

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