Educated or Qualified ?

Few weeks back we had this essay competition at work place and one of the topics was related to discipline in the workplace. The response was good and many people chose this topic and forum to share their views. Being an avid reader I went through a couple of them. The term discipline has always evinced a lot of interest in me as it’s related to humans at a more fundamental level.The couple of essays I went through brought up the issues very nicely and the authors used real life examples to strengthen their arguments. Getting real life examples in an organization like ours is not very tough. A place where twelve thousand people (at last count) spend the better part of their day is bound to be a good place to observe human character. People refusing to stand in queues, not adhering to dressing code and noncompliance to several other guidelines outlined by the company would be easy enough to spot in a place like this.Now the question is do these examples even start addressing the real issue of indiscipline. Is it really important that employees don’t adhere to company policies related to behavior? Is it really a point of concern that an employee decides to wear a jeans and a t shirt to office? Is it really a point of concern that people take print outs of offensive literature for personal amusements using company resources? At the end of it should we really be bothered about the fact that people are breaking rules of which they are fully aware?I don’t think so!!I feel what we really should be worried about is the fact that in a company where each one of its employee is highly qualified and considered to be among the brightest minds in the country, rules have to be laid down in the first place. In a company which prides over its employees as being morally upright and socially conscious, isn’t this a bit strange?This doesn’t reflect very well on us, that the management doesn’t think we are smart enough to know the difference between acceptable behavior in a work place and unruly conduct. This is an organization where almost all employees are graduates and a lot are equipped with even higher educational qualifications from the most reputed institutes of our country. The fact that the decision makers should feel the need to control and monitor the actions of such employees is a disgrace in itself. It’s this huge contradiction which no one seems to notice.Well it’s not so tough to find out why this contradiction is so easily palatable to all of us and as to why my prior statements would have raised quite a lot of eyebrows.Our society is based so strongly on the principles of obedience and adherence to rules that we don’t bat an eyelid when every action of ours is governed by some sort of rule.If you observe the normal life of a human being in society you will easily notice the stages it passes though like infancy, school, college, job, marriage, family and even death are all riddled with rules. The successful completion of each stage depends on how well you were able to obey and follow others without questioning anything. If you did as you were told, if you accepted everything you heard as the ultimate truth, if you imbibed each sermon imposed upon you by whoever had the authority to do so you passed on to the next stage and were hailed as the role model for others.In infancy a child is dependant on the parents for its very survival. It doesn’t have the mental capacity to decide for its own and has to be looked after by the mother. The mother in turn decides what is right and what is wrong for the child. A 2 year old who has just begin to crawl around the room wouldn’t know the danger associated with poking its finger into an electric socket or trying to act funny with a sharp knife in their hand. Thus it’s the mothers responsibility to make sure that she prevents the child from hurting itself in any which way. “Don’t touch that”, “stay away from that” are common enough examples of the earliest rules a human child faces. All of them are necessary in order to survive.When the child grows to an age where it has to interact with the external society other factors come into the picture. The parents then try to inculcate the accepted societal niceties into the child’s behavior. This is more or less the age at which the child starts school.Here comes the child’s first proper interaction with authority, the teacher. There are very clear and well defined rules regarding behavior in a class or in a school. There are specific dos and even sterner don’ts. When the kid enters school it has a very clear picture as to what is permissible in terms of behavior in specific social environments.The shoes have to be polished just right, the uniform has to be clean, the homework has to be done and oh! Yes! No questions are supposed to be asked. As the kid grows older and turns into an adolescent these rules are ingrained deep into its psyche. Parents teach the virtues of being polite to guests, not to question elders, not to mingle with the opposite sex, study hard and try securing the highest marks possible and finally culminate into the highest paid individual. Teachers have slightly different but similar ways. Do your homework and you will get good marks. Listen to what we say, memorize it and try reproducing it during exams and you will get good marks. Take whatever is written in text books as the gospel of god and mug them up. In both the cases one thing is common. PLEASE DON’T ASK ANYTHING, Which at a more fundamental level means PLEASE DON’T THINK!!The same thing is amplified in college with a very misplaced version of freedom sold to youth. Freedom has got nothing to do with the clothes you wear or the hairstyles you are allowed to keep. Freedom has got nothing to do with the late nights and the number of girlfriends/boyfriends you are allowed to go out with. Freedom is the right to think for ones own self and lead life the way one feels is right. This is something which certainly doesn’t exist. The idea of an ideal life is sold to us by parents, teachers, equally clueless peers and the general society as a whole. Most of the times parents decide what we should study and the kind of career which would be fruitful for our future. Well in fact they also decide whom we should marry in order to have a happy married life.Yes that’s what is ingrained into our minds time and again throughout our lives. Most of the times it’s done in such a subtle manner that we don’t even notice it, but most of the time its given to us plain and simple, straight in our face. How many of us recollect analyzing history in our school. Would I be wrong in assuming that all of us were so busy mugging up the dates and the names that we never could find time to think why we were doing so?How many times have all of us heard the statement “don’t answer back” or “how dare you talk back to me”. How often has it been made amply clear to us that we should let others (read parents) decide for us as we wouldn’t know what’s right for us. The indoctrination of unquestioning belief is so strong in human society that the victims and the perpetrators are equally clueless.Is this what education means? Turning out robots who can’t think for themselves.The fact that humans have the most sophisticated brain which is capable of infinite things is lost on most people. The affinity towards adherence to pre defined standards and abhorrence for individual thinking is appalling.Well in such a situation is it surprising that the people who founded this company or any company for that matter thought it more realistic to lay down rules rather than leave it to us. Can we actually blame them for not believing that we are just not good enough to know on our own what we should do and what we shouldn’t?It seems they know perfectly well that they hired just highly qualified people but not educated ones.