2010年11月1日星期一

Myths and Realities of Childhood Education

Some times I wonder why we send our children to school.Is it for learning, or for evolving from a clay to a valuable asset, or for becoming good citizens and above all - to become good human beings. Let us evaluate if any of these purposes are being fulfilled.In India more than 80% of the population can afford to send their children only to Government schools. A peep into such schools reveal apathy and helplessness of children and teachers. A class room has over 60 children and how do you expect a teacher to evolve them - it would be difficult even to remember all the 60 names. What do they learn - they learn how to mug up without understanding the meaning or application of what they learnt. It is common for us to see students learning theorems and riders 'by heart'. You twist the question slightly and would realise that they get puzzled. Look at some of the competitions held - recitation competition - where one needs to mug what a famous personality said 'verbatim' - without realising the applicability in today's life. When I refer competition, it is taught by the system to make one feel low when one loses the competition - no help in analysing what went wrong and how that can be improved.How do you think a child will face the world unless we teach them how to fail - and stand up after every time one fails. We condemn the failures without realizing whether the student has any interest in that subject. The added burden is the 'super parents' who expect their wards to be 'super children' - participating in all competitions known to the parents and win each of them.If every parent want their child to win, is it a myth or a reality? I would give an example of a dog show. Usually in a dog show, the winner and the loser (both are dogs of course) are not bothered about their state of victory - but the owners of the dogs feels so bad if their dog could not make it to 'the best dog' titleand the owner of thewinner is so jubliant that it becomes teh talk of teh club for that night. You will find that both the winner and the loser dogs are happy buddies sharing a common growl without knowing what have they gone through and how their owners feel. Tell me how different is the scenario with super parents and super children?My humble request to parents and teachers is to accept the basic feeling that no child is perfect (neither an adult) and so accept each child with their strengths and improvement areas, work on their improvement areas without cursing or comparing. On top of all these, pleae allow them to be children - children always would like to test their boundaries - and so make mistakes. Have we not made mistakes?Even during our times as children, we used to wonder why teachers do not understand what we wanted. Today, we have grown, but still the current children has the same question. So what has gone wrong? Is the problem with the system or with us. Let me remind you that systems are formed by us and so to be changes by us.The case is not very different in private funded schools either. First we need to address teh parents and teh teachers before attempting to educate the children.Is it a myth that children go to school for learning and the teachers are teaching?Unless we accept these children as they are - it would remain a myth.I would come up with another article soon on the situation of grown up children. Stay tuned.Regards,Dr. PM Anavaratham

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