WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OUR CHILDREN?
The above question has
been bothering me for way too long now. I finally have decided to write about
it and help get some clarity or some solutions to this question.
Being a Life skills trainer and a School
Counsellor, I have realized that at school level nothing matters to the child
and their families other than the marks or the grades that they receive. Why
are they so obsessed with the percentages? Scoring 100/100 or 99/100 is what
their life is all about. Oh wait it’s just not them, it’s the entire school-
the teachers, the management everyone apart from the physical structure of the
school, who are placing this huge mountain on those small little heads. Do they
even realize what is happening to the child?? Do they care to even give a
thought to anything else?
Let’s go back a few years to understand what
exactly the purpose of Education was..The Vedic education focused on the skills
necessary for an occupations and mostly involved experiential learning. The Upanishads
on the other hand involved an exploratory learning process where the teacher
and the student walked the search for truth together. The Gurukul system has
the observation method of learning which believes in learning from your
teacher/guru as he/she acts like a role model for the students. These different
schools focused on imparting knowledge through different learning methods. Well
not just that, but they also helped the student learn certain important life
skills which further helped them in their professional lives as well.
Coming back to the 21st century, what is
the purpose of education? Is it any different than what it was a few years ago?
I believe that the difference exists only in the advancement of technology
where knowledge can be imparted in very many ways through videos, online
articles etc. The teachers have begun to equip themselves in these new
methodologies to make learning beneficial for the students. Let’s go back to
asking what the purpose is? Is it again to get marks, to get into a good
college, to get into a so called ‘professional course’? The answer surprisingly
is a big Yes which you will receive from the students, although the teachers
and parents will say “no no,thats not what we want, we want our child to be
stable”, which has further made them
believe in ‘All work and No
play’.
Oh come on, let’s face it. It is not just about
marks. What happens to all the toppers in the X standard? Do they continue
topping every exam after that? If yes, the percentage is minimal. A lot of
children are unable to handle the pressures in life because all this while they
believed in giving into pressures and when they can’t they opt out of life
itself. Children are not equipped to face with such pressures. They still need
to be guided. All of a sudden they cannot be dropped into an empty well and ask
them to find their way out of it. Our role as educators is to help them find a
path for themselves and to climb up on their own with their effort and our
support.
Why aren’t we looking at the all-round development
of children and help them think that there is so much to do in life rather than
focusing on marks? Yes, I am not saying marks are not important, instead I am
saying marks are not everything. It’s time to get real and focus on building
knowledge rather than making them hate and like different subjects due to the marks
they score in them.
Let us begin by looking at the child’s perspective
and then try to offer solutions which would work best for them. We all have
been through schooling, there is definitely something that each of us have
learnt from the ten years we spent there. Personally I feel that we need to
focus on their all round development and help them grow in their intelligence's (referring to Howard Gardeners’ theory of Multiple intelligence) independently in
those areas and yes of course a change in the curriculum and the system is
needed in the long run.
If not, to benefit themselves, children will
probably have to follow this method as suggested by Mark Twain.
