Education?

kaRka kasadaRak kaRpavai katrapin niRka adhaRkuth thaga - Thirukkural

Whatever you learn, learn flawlessly and thoroughly; and live in accordance to those tenets - Loose translation

The thing about Tiru is that, after you have a dose of him, you get a whole new appreciation of how lenient your parents really are. Even if, right from their 'good morning' to their lullaby, their sole litany is your school grades. I mean, yeah, they do really push it but, honestly, do they ever expect perfection from you? (Yeah! Well! They know you too well, no matter how doting they are as parents. Perfect? You? HA!)

But Tiru...! The chap does not even know the guys he is talking to and he will settle for nothing less than perfection. Learn thoroughly? Flawlessly? He really expects that you will understand what you are learning completely without any misunderstanding of the concepts? Cloud Cuckoo Land stuff, really. Yeah, one can give some leeway for the fact that he does not know you personally but still...I mean, is it even human to expect it? And, LIVE by those tenets? As if anyone was learning for anything more than getting a good grade, even in his times.

Apparently, in his times what people considered education was morality, social behavior, human interactions and things like that. You know, it seems like fantasy really. I mean, can you really imagine a time where you were left to learn the STEM subjects on the job and taught ONLY the so-called humanities? And they called THAT education. But well, those were ancient times, so understandably they had no exposure to modern ideas of education where you only teach the STEM subjects and allow the humanities to be learned on the job, in a manner of speaking.

So, anyway, LIVE by those tenets did not really mean that, if you were a programmer, you had to live a life seeing things in 'zeros' and 'ones', since programming itself would not have been on the syllabus of that education system. So, Tiru was expecting people to live by the morals that they learned, adopt the social behavior they were taught and so on and so forth...and the chap does not even allow you the leeway to claim that you misunderstood the thing cos you get no brownie points for that. You are supposed to learn thoroughly and flawlessly, remember?

Anyway, that's all to let you guys know how much simpler it is for you guys now. All you need to get from your education is grades and you keep whimpering about pressure. Just think of Tiru's students!