Modern science is trying to resolve the issue of what determines one’s Personality.
That it is yet to finalise on what Personality is a different matter.
Science is trying to attribute Genetics or the environment as a factor for the development of Personality ,Character.
Some are of the opinion that Genes are responsible for one’s behaviour and character,some Environment and yet others a combination of both.
Contrary to what many think ,Hinduism is not merely a collection of Slokas,mantras and Realization of Self.
Hinduism,unlike other Religion does not shun daily,practical Life.
It states the worldly duties are a part of spiritual evolution.
One may notice that all religious practices of Hindus involve physical elements.
Character,according to Hinduism, is not mereley an amagamation,aggregate of Traits but includes dispositions as well.
That is the tendency to act in a particular fashion.
Every human being is unique and it is not possible to stereotypes.
Again one’s disposition or action,moods do not remain the same at all times.
It keeps changing.
Without stereotyping, Hinduism classifies these Dispositions into Three.
Sathva,the Calm,Discerning,learned and cheeful,
Rajas,Dynamic,Emotional,active and optimistic and
Tamas,Static,Lazy,uninterested,pessimistic and doubtful.
I have written in detail on this.
The Gunas,Dispositions urge one to act and are responsible for one’s Behaviour.
Lord Krishna deals with this issue in the Bhagavad Gita and in finer detail in the 14th Chaper,Gunatgraya Vibhaaga Yoga,the art of Three Gunas.
Shall write in detail later.
Now how are these Gunas develop?
While the origin of the Gunas is because of Nature,Prakriti,not much detail is found in texts, save in Srimad Bhagavatham.
For Disposition to develop these are the Factors,Causes.
Water. What one drinks,especially water influences one’s disposition.( Environment)
Place of Birth is a factor that decide one’s Attitudes.( Genetics)
Time of Birth,which influences ones character.( Environment)
Actions performed determine Gunas.( Genetics and Environment)
Thoughts affect Character.( Genetics and Environment)
Pedigree,from whom one is born is another factor.(Genetics)
Rules of Good Behaviour.(Environment)
Time of Performing Actions,(Environment)
Carrying out Laid down,the Samskaras ( 40) ( Environment)
Japa,the regular practice of intoning and Children.( Genetics and Environment)
‘āgamo ‘paḥ prajā deśaḥ kālaḥ karma ca janma ca dhyānaṁ mantro ‘tha saṁskāro daśaite guṇa-hetavaḥ’
Srimad Bhagavatha, 11/13/4.
‘āgamaḥ—religious scriptures; apaḥ—water; prajāḥ—association with people in general or one’s children; deśaḥ—place; kālaḥ—time; karma—activities; ca—also; janma—birth; ca—also; dhyānam—meditation; mantraḥ—chanting of mantras; atha—and; saṁskāraḥ—rituals for purification; daśa—ten; ete—these; guṇa—of the modes of nature; hetavaḥ-causes..
According to the quality of religious scriptures, water, one’s association with one’s children or with people in general, the particular place, the time, activities, birth, meditation, chanting of mantras, and purificatory rituals, the modes of nature become differently prominent.
The present Educational System places stress only on scoring marks in a chosen subject, which generally is thrust upon the students.
This process begins at an early age when the child is not capable of making choices.
Parents, bowing to their peer pressure,places the child in a stream which they think will be good for it-mostly economic success of the child.
The least the parents could do,in Indian circumstances and Indian educational System,is to allow the child to choose a course of its liking when they reach Standard 10 or equivalent thereof .
Then the child can pursue what it wants, though some times its choice might prove to be erroneous.
The next step to spoil the individual is the system of Education which takes into account only the economic prosperity , that is earning money as the goal of Life.
One who comes through the system finds himself at the cross roads in Life in his thirties, assailed by self-doubt as to what he has been doing is worth the while.
This , I have seen is one of the critical factors of Depression and Stress.
Economic prosperity is conditioned and determined by the Society and it can not be avoided.
A balance can be struck
One is to be trained to understand that what excites him/her most normally does not bring in money and one should organize things in such a way as to pursue the system to ensure trouble free economic stability-none can pursue what they want with a clean mind with out this-and do what one wants to do in Life.
This is not easy but can be done with determination and patience.
When you are int he present system of Education you can not escape the Percentages, Ranks .
When the supply of Manpower is more than the Jobs available, this filtering can not be avoided.
What one should know is that scoring marks and ranks alone is not the ‘be and end all’ of Life and take this issue as a challenge and win.
When we talk of Winning, it is also a fact that all of us can not be winners in all we do.
We should know what our limitations are and proceed with the Business of Life.
I shall Blog on Character and Education .
Please the following article on the issue relating to whether ‘Students have to fail to succeed?’ in New York Times.
Studiy?
“Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School — which is odd, because he’s the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City’s most prestigious private schools, with a 104-year-old campus that looks down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park from the top of a steep hill in the richest part of the Bronx. On the discussion boards of UrbanBaby.com, worked-up moms from the Upper East Side argue over whether Riverdale sends enough seniors to Harvard, Yale and Princeton to be considered truly “TT” (top-tier, in UrbanBabyese), or whether it is more accurately labeled “2T” (second-tier), but it is, certainly, part of the city’s private-school elite, a place members of the establishment send their kids to learn to be members of the establishment. Tuition starts at $38,500 a year, and that’s for prekindergarten.
Randolph, by contrast, comes across as an iconoclast, a disrupter, even a bit of an eccentric. He dresses for work every day in a black suit with a narrow tie, and the outfit, plus his cool demeanor and sweep of graying hair, makes you wonder, when you first meet him, if he might have played sax in a ska band in the ’80s. (The English accent helps.) He is a big thinker, always chasing new ideas, and a conversation with him can feel like a one-man TED conference, dotted with references to the latest work by behavioral psychologists and management gurus and design theorists. When he became headmaster in 2007, he swapped offices with his secretary, giving her the reclusive inner sanctum where previous headmasters sat and remodeling the small outer reception area into his own open-concept work space, its walls covered with whiteboard paint on which he sketches ideas and slogans. One day when I visited, one wall was bare except for a white sheet of paper. On it was printed a single black question mark.
For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are “a patently unfair system” because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. “This push on tests,” he told me, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”
The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained as we sat in his office last fall, is character — those essential traits of mind and habit that were drilled into him at boarding school in England and that also have deep roots in American history. “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”
Randolph has been pondering throughout his 23-year career as an educator the question of whether and how schools should impart good character. It has often felt like a lonely quest, but it has led him in some interesting directions. In the winter of 2005, Randolph read “Learned Optimism,” a book by Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped establish the Positive Psychology movement. Randolph found the book intriguing, and he arranged a meeting with the author. As it happened, on the morning that Randolph made the trip to Philadelphia, Seligman had scheduled a separate meeting with David Levin, the co-founder of the KIPP network of charter schools and the superintendent of the KIPP schools in New York City. Seligman decided he might as well combine the two meetings, and he invited Christopher Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who was also visiting Penn that day, to join him and Randolph and Levin in his office for a freewheeling discussion of psychology and schooling.
Levin had also spent many years trying to figure out how to provide lessons in character to his students, who were almost all black or Latino and from low-income families. At the first KIPP school, in Houston, he and his co-founder, Michael Feinberg, filled the walls with slogans like “Work Hard” and “Be Nice” and “There Are No Shortcuts,” and they developed a system of rewards and demerits designed to train their students not only in fractions and algebra but also in perseverance and empathy. Like Randolph, Levin went to Seligman’s office expecting to talk about optimism. But Seligman surprised them both by pulling out a new and very different book, which he and Peterson had just finished:“Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification,” a scholarly, 800-page tome that weighed in at three and a half pounds. It was intended, according to the authors, as a “manual of the sanities,” an attempt to inaugurate what they described as a “science of good character.”
It was, in other words, exactly what Randolph and Levin had been looking for, separately, even if neither of them had quite known it. Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude.
In most societies, Seligman and Peterson wrote, these strengths were considered to have a moral valence, and in many cases they overlapped with religious laws and strictures. But their true importance did not come from their relationship to any system of ethics or moral laws but from their practical benefit: cultivating these strengths represented a reliable path to “the good life,” a life that was not just happy but also meaningful and fulfilling.
Imparting knowledge is beyond the classification of service.It is the welfare of the students a real teacher is looking at.Education means’culling out’-getting the best out of the individuals.We have strayed too far from the definition of Education.What we teach or cram is information, not knowledge.No effort is tsken to build character,mental strength, spiritual upliftment,emotional stability.Real education must be built on this fulcrum with information which we impart now as an add on.
Information can be sold not education.Education must shape life not mere career.
Under the present system of education, teacher student relation ship is that of a consumer and and the supplier.Till such time we impart wisdom and have Teachers who are selfless and students after knowledge as against career options, the relationship shall remain as between supplier and consumer.This is the Reality. A recent article in The Chicago Tribune described a continuing debate in business schools over whether their enrollees should be regarded as “customers” rather than as traditional students. Should the students have more say over what they are taught and even how they are judged? What’s the risk of the student-consumer approach in M.B.A. programs? And does the issue reflect broader issues in higher education?
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus, George Washington
Edward A. Snyder, dean, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
David Bejou, dean, Elizabeth City State University School of Business
Richard Vedder, professor of economics, Ohio University
Mark C. Taylor, professor of religion, Columbia University
Drinking for any reason whatsoever is not good.Families are ruined because of Drinking.
Many take shelter under the argument that social drinking is good for it improves their business contacts and non drinkers are not accepted in the elite group.Those who drink are not elite but irresponsible people,at least in terms of health and and their families.
Others say it is good for health citing few researches.But there are other ways to improve health including taking healthy food and and going to bed early.
If parents, under the illusion of giving freedom to children, encourage drinking, are ruining their children and their families.
Parents, be Adults, not adolescents >.
PARENTS of Schoolies revellers are ignoring pleas from police, politicians and welfare leaders to stop buying alcohol for their underage children.
Police were forced to issue a $750 fine to the father of a former student of St Joseph’s Nudgee College who defied an order to tip out the alcohol bought for his underage son.
Police spotted the man unloading alcohol outside a Surfers Paradise apartment on Saturday afternoon, first issuing him with a caution, then ordering him to tip out the alcohol, before he defiantly declared: ”I’ll just go and get some more”.
Gold Coast police superintendent Jim Keogh described the incident as ”extremely disappointing”.
”It is irresponsible and in one instance, certainly, you had a parent who just openly defied police instruction and that is a real concern,” he said.
A number of tip-out orders were also issued against other parents.
Nudgee College dean of students Paul Begg said the incident was disappointing as students were taught about the impacts of alcohol and violence.
New figures show parents worry more about their children being bullied and the amount of time spent in front of the computer than drinking alcohol.
The Australia-wide survey commissioned by parenting group Generation Next found nearly half of all parents think it is OK to sometimes serve alcohol to a 16-year-old.
But alcohol and drug experts said children are too young to drink alcohol at 16 years of age, mostly because their brains were yet to be fully developed.
”In terms of brain development, it’s a key time and the evidence says quite clearly you should delay the onset of drinking for as long as possible.”
Asked about their concerns for their children, 60 per cent of parents were worried about bullying, 42 per cent feared their children were on the computer too long, 41 per cent were anxious about children having sex at a young age and 37 per cent worried about children using illegal drugs, while just 33 per cent nominated drinking alcohol.
Australian Medical Association Queensland President Dr Mason Stevenson said parents appeared to have their priorities wrong.
”It concerns me if any survey puts alcohol misuse further down the list when, medically speaking, it needs to be top of the list,” he said.
”It is our number one drug problem in Australia. Parents are grossly underestimating the problem and . . . the young person’s risk of harm.”
Gold Coast Schoolies Advisory Board chairman Mark Reaburn said parents had to set a better example.
”One parent paid a very expensive price,” he said. ”We know kids are going to consume alcohol at Schoolies, but the parents have to accept some responsibility as well.”
Police and Schoolies officials were happy with the overall behaviour of revellers on the Gold Coast. Of the 30 schoolies arrested on Saturday’s traditionally wild opening night, most were for drunk and disorderly or public nuisance offences, with just three drug arrests and none for violent crime.
Schoolies organisers issued about 20,000 wristbands for the exclusive schoolies-only entertainment hub, but only about 12,000 attended the venue, an alcohol-free beachfront area fenced off from ”Toolies” (older hangers-on) and other troublemakers.
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