Patricia Mukhim
This article is meant to shake the conscience of those running educational institutions and producing an assembly line of students that pass out without imbibing the real meaning of education. Yes, the results are just out …ICSE, CBSE, etc. Next in line is the MBOSE Class XII and X results. And what after that? Parents will rush for admissions to the best schools and colleges? And how are those best schools and colleges rated? On the basis of their results; not on the quality of the students they churn out. It’s a rat race and there’s so much of catching up in this race. Parents push the accelerator hard without ever questioning what their kids actually want. Conversations between parents and kids mostly end up in blame games and the kids just clamp up for the sake of peace. At my age I am an onlooker to this extremely competitive game of thrones where each parent wants their child to occupy that pride of place in the economic ladder. That’s what all the grunt work and the pushing and shouting and quarrelling are all about.
Those who run institutions know what parents aspire for their kids. They will cater to that angst and will not engage parents in a conversation which could help them see their children and what their deepest yearnings are through a set of realistic lenses. If the owners of institutions start doing that they would lose out on the number of admissions. It’s a rat race. The problem with a rat race, as someone said, is that even if you win the race you are still a rat.
Why do parents send their children to school? The primary reasons are because they want their kids to learn basic social skills such as sharing, making friends, developing language through conversations, asking permission to borrow something, toilet training; learning to negotiate and above all learning to wait for one’s turn. I recall visiting a kindergarten school in the US where kids don’t sit on chairs but on mats on the floor and play with toys. After the playtime is over the teacher tells sing a song, “Clean up, clean up everybody, everywhere, clean up, clean up everybody do your share.” At this age kids are already taught to understand rules and follow directions. In the classroom there is a story corner, a puzzle table and games table where there is no winning or losing, no right or wrong. Parents are invited to observe how their child interacts with other kids or if he/she is an introvert. They also see how the child is learning. Is she receptive when presented with new tasks or is she slow, shy? This enables both parents and teachers to work together to help the child with no blame whatsoever.
I sit with young parents regularly and listen to their tales of woe about their children’s schooling; their non-performance or lackluster performance. They despair. But that’s not all. These days teachers call parents and complain rudely on a regular basis about their children not having completed their assignments. Sure parents have a role to play and most parents do their bit but not every parent has gone through B Ed classes where child psychology is taught. But, every teacher today is expected to have gone through the grill; to understand how each child is to be handled; motivated, disciplined, encouraged, prodded on etc. When we were growing up we had reading classes so each students read a few paragraphs loudly. That was how we learnt pronunciation and diction. When we read fables, myths and history we were asked what important values we have leant from the lesson. Learning then was fun because no teacher ever raised their hand against anyone.
Coming to the point of physical punishment, I was appalled to learn that in an elite Christian school corporal punishment was regularly meted out to students. And I was told this is a not a new phenomenon but that it was a normal thing in that school. Parents are paranoid about complaining lest they be told, “Take your boy somewhere else.” I asked some parents why they did not broach this subject at the PTA meeting. After all this is violation of the rights of the child but they had nothing to say. The desire to proclaim to the world, “My son passed out from St… so and so school or even the not so saintly public schools is so overwhelming that they would rather see the child suffer in agony than tackle the school authorities. What an ego trap this is. A child that experiences violence in school or at home will soon become a violent teenager and a violent adult seeking out revenge for all he has lumped up and suffered in his younger days. And the fact that his parents can do nothing, despite knowing what he goes through, will make him see them as accomplices in the crime.
There are many who trot out the lame argument that it’s not easy to teach boys especially in this day and age. Well I have been a teacher for a quarter century and half of that was spent teaching boys of Class VII – X. Perhaps the only difference was that the school I taught in was not an elite school; the majority of boys came from distressed families. Hence they valued the education they got at great cost. Most of them found it hard to pay a school fee of Rs 120 a month then. Poverty is perhaps a great teacher but affluent parents often destroy a child’s moral fibre. Most parents believe in instant gratification. A child asks for a mobile phone and hey pronto he gets it! How can a child of Class VI or VII be expected to be disciplined in using a mobile phone when we grown- ups are so addicted to it. Now with games like PUBG which even adult males are hooked to, a mobile phone means destroying the child’s concentration. It was heartening to hear from the recent toppers of the ICSE and CBSE exams that the reason for their success is that they were not on social media. Social media far from being social tends to lure people into an illusory existence where their emotions are allowed full play whereas those same emotions are bottled up in real life.
There is as yet no known antidote to the mobile phone craze and its twins Facebook, Twitter and some of the sinister games now on the phone. As parents and elders we ourselves need counseling on how to stay away from the mobile phone; forget about telling our kids the same. After all children learn by seeing, not by hearing! Like they say example is better than precept.
And coming to the real meaning of education, today its more about quantity (marks) than quality (values and principles of good living). Children today have no empathy because education itself is competitive. Collaborative learning as practised in Japan and elsewhere, where students share what they learn with one another and therefore learn from each other is unheard of in India. Research has found that learning outcomes are much better through collaboration then when learning alone. In fact, by combining all the different thoughts, learning is hugely enriched.
Another disturbing trend one sees in India is that students pass out of school and college without any skills other than computer application skills. Skills are much prized in western education and work experience helps them gain entry into good universities. There isn’t any rush to go on from school to college to university. Vocational education has been just a talking point in our country. We have not given it the required attention. It’s high time we gave credit to skills education.
Recently a friend from Finland said most parents in that country are now doing homeschooling. She said in homeschooling the learning is child-led not teacher-led and the child is nurtured and allowed to excel in what he/she is good at.
In India too homeschooling is catching on. Although there are no studies yet on the results of homeschooling in India, studies from countries like Finland, Sweden etc., have found that such children perform substantially better than their conventionally educated counterparts, in areas such as verbal fluency, independence, and life skills. Talking about homeschooling in India, the youngest person to ever clear the highly competitive Indian Institute of Technology, Joint Entrance Examination, in 2010, Sahal Kaushik with a rank of 33 in the country, and standing first in Delhi at the young age of 14, was homeschooled.
It’s time for parents to get out of the rut of schooling their children in elite institutions where the competition is about which brand of car a child comes to school in and which is the more expensive brand. If this is what schooling teaches a child and not how to live life and to struggle to get what they want in life, then education surely is wasted. Marks do not a person make, but the values imbibed along the way are what will stand every student in good stead through life.