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Education and Literacy

I have been going over this topic a lot these days and trying to figure out a good difference and meeting point of these two terms. The only way I can merge these are when people say – “Educate the person, to make him literate”. But is this really true? I think not. You can make a person literate by making him read and write a spoken language [different from a computer or other language synonyms in use], but can you really make him educated? Education imparts a lot more than just simple literacy for the person. The person may be having a high degree in his name, but then he would only be literate in a sense of what he has studied. Education to me means the overall development and growth of an individual, who gains maturity from what he studied.
Cases are where they say, ‘the Mother should be literate to teach her child’. Well! to that I can add, that she should be educated enough to understand what she learnt. Rather then make her learn by rote, as has been the norm in most of our cases. People who learn by rote, due to peer or parent pressure, never learn anything, except to throw up whatever they mugged up. That is not education or learning, that is simply trying to make sure that a ‘guilt’ duty has been imparted. Check out the education given by the Teachers of the past and the literacy campaigns being run today. Although the Teachers are still that dedicated lot, but the ‘Education System’ and its “protectors”, try their mightiest to make the kids into monogrammed robots, who will become voting banks for them, rather than ‘Thinking Adults’. I think it is time we woke up to this reality and started thinking of making ‘Educated Adults’, rather than ‘Literate Adults’. Literacy can be taught at any age, as has been proven with the Kerala initiative, but we now need education also to be imparted with the same zeal. This will make our children into better Human Beings, who can learn to think and do things, rather than remian kids their whole life.