Manager

Message from the table of Manager

Warm greetings to all from Father Manager!

At the end of Second World War, a letter was found in a Nazi concentration camp which contained the following message addressing the teachers: “Dear teachers, I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should have witnessed: gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, woman and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So, I am suspicious of education.”

If the above suspicion has to disappear, our system of education must help our students become more human than monsters. My earnest wish is that Alphonsa School, Miraj continues to lead the way in helping our students attain academic heights giving due importance to human and moral formation. Let us continue to take care that our efforts at the school never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated illiterates, etc.

What then is the goal of education? It is not just imparting information. Today children do not come to the teacher as a “tabula rasa” (blank slate) but as a formed product. Therefore, teachers today need pedagogical intelligence to reach a child’s conscience. They should mould the students entrusted to their care. The students must be taught not only their rights but also their fundamental duties. They must learn important lessons of life at the school:

• let them learn how to acquire the information they might need in future;
• let them feel confident about their learning abilities;
• let them grow to be functional and thoughtful adults in their day-to-day lives;
• let them learn good lifelong habits (punctuality, dutifulness, respect for others);
• let them acquire the skill to work as part of a team and solve problems.

Briefly, reading, writing and arithmetic—the core topics of education—are useful only if they serve the purpose of making our children more human and responsible members of the society and the nation at large. Let us not forget that QUALITY EDUCATION is a sensible investment for the future.

“If you plan for a year, cultivate crops; if you plan for a decade, plant fruit-bearing trees; if you plan for a century, EDUCATE people!”

Fr Shaji Joseph 

Manager