Please allow me to share some useful material as a pre-cursor to discussing the pitfalls of traversing the CQ(C-Quandrant) of COL without traversing the other quadrants of COL.
On NBC’s Today program, a segment called ‘Today Investigates’ took up a subject that was close to my heart. What I heard depressed me, dismayed me and deflated me.
We all agree that competition is good and the competition does not exist without the people who are behind it to make it happen. While trying be competitive, we always measure up to something that we see or hear or feel. We would like to excel at what we are doing to beat the competition. All are noble thoughts and all such attempts need to be appreciated and supported fully.
But this attempt to excel at colleges, through the only benchmark that is available, put me in a state of shock. One of the students was saying that this is like students on steroids to excel academically. What a nonsense! But more than that, why has it reached this epidemic proportions?
All boils down to scoring high GPA’s at colleges. It needs high amount focus on the subjects the students are learning about and studying about. As I had said before, the distractions are too many and hence the focus to study will be shallow and hollow, unless something is done about it. Students of 21st century are smart and they do understand what is being asked to excel at studies. Well, they fall back on some sort of quick fix to get it right – meaning to get the focus back onto the studies. At the bottom of all this is this abuse of a wonder-drug or a smart-drug called ‘Aderall’. This drug is meant for those who suffer from attention deficit syndrome, but is now being abused at the colleges to excel at studies.
Is this kind of benchmark that we need to push towards to decide on who is best and who is not, no matter what the cost is? Some students have claimed that their parents don’t know anything about it. This brings me to that privacy law that separates well wishing parents from their sons and daughters, and that too, when children need their parents support the most, for guidance. Sometimes, I wonder whether we are pushing the envelope to the individual-ness to an extent where humans will soon start destroying themselves without the knowledge of knowing that they themselves are the cause for it.
That apart, this smart-drug Aderall is a nuisance drug, addictive and may damage the very abilities of the person needed to survive in this modern world. We are exercising more of our brains than the body and that wonderful brain is being punished in hundred many ways. Even though some students have claimed that this drug makes them to forget the whole world except the text books that they are reading, it also has been proven to be detrimental to creative writing and creative learning, according to the director of NIDA(National Institute on Drug Abuse).
Have we lost ourselves in this highly connected world in an attempt to push ourselves to be on top of the things at every step of our lives – when it is not needed, to be so? Have we forgotten the ways in which the body and the brain can be trained for whatever we ask from it without the intervention from drugs? While setting the goals high, are we failing to chart out a path to aim for it?
More I learn about what is happening in our education system, I am becoming more confident in the ability of COL to present the much needed answers for such puzzling questions. CQ will not only benchmark the learning, but will also help to chart out a path to meet or exceed the goals set. To do so, it is only asking you to do the simplest thing – traverse the COL to visit other quadrants and bring back those learnings into CQ to define the path to achieve greatness in the 21st century without subjecting to benchmarks that are either artificial or out of touch with the real benchmarks that are needed to lead a fruitful life and also to contribute to the society that is making it possible.