Wither Schooling

With the introduction and implementation of the New Education Policy, many children in India are enrolled in school each year.

 Again, recently there has been talk of raising our education standards.

What is the intended goal?

Is it to have classrooms over-flooded with children?

Is it to make sure that children know what they are supposed to know before letting them into the next grade?

Or is it to provide a good and effective learning environment and conditions?

Most of our institutions are low achieving institutions churning out children who are not performing very well, we are producing only some islands of excellence and the same does not satisfy the criterion of quality education or that of universalisation of education. It has to expand and we don’t have to be apologetic about it since in the melee of quantity, quality is bound to suffer.

The experience I have is that most of these children fail in school. They complete their schooling only because we have agreed to push them up through the grades and out of schools whether they know anything or not.

Principally, children from the time of birth upto three years have a tremendous capacity for learning, understanding, and creating. This is an ability which they are born with, and they really make full use of it during the first three years of their life. However, as they grow old and go to school, they fail to develop their capacity further at school age. Have you ever noticed that before the child is sent to school, he feels free to learn and discover things he is interested in, and sometimes seeks solutions from willing adults around him. He does so in order to create his own happy universe.

As soon as the child is enrolled in school, he finds himself being taught things that often contradict other things he has been told. Even the teachers are not as friendly as the adults at home. This makes the child afraid, bored and confused. They become afraid because they have been told they are at school in order to learn and pass exams and the fear comes when they think of failing the exams, which they know will disappoint and displease the adults around them. They get bored because they learn things, which do not interest them, and they learn them in the most monotonous and dull ways, which make such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of their intelligence, capabilities and talents.  

For example let us consider the problem of boredom, children use various strategies to dodge or meet the demands put on them by adults.

Some of the strategies include:

1.         Not to agree to understand instruction no matter how plain they are.

2.         Mumbling is used when the child is not sure of the answer and is afraid of the teacher but has to raise his hand to save himself from punishment.

3.         Take advantage of pupils who don't pay attention. They know that teachers usually surprise non-listeners with questions, so these children would wave their hands in the air as if they were bursting to tell the answer whether they really know it or not. This is simply a manoeuvre to make the teacher give the answer himself.

4.         Guess work -just like the above strategy, they will answer anyhow just to irritate the teacher and force him to solve the problem for them.

 

On analyzing the interaction between children and teachers, we find that the effects of this interaction on the children's strategies and learning are very adverse. Corporal punishment is merely one bad interaction, which ruins children's appetites for learning. We as educators use quite a few ceremonies of humiliation of a child, which start as early as possible just when the children are trusting, hopeful and incapable of doing any physical harm to teachers.

It may be pertinent to point out that teachers resort to these harmful acts because they lack self-confidence in their competence. Their thinking is so dormant that they can't think of initiating new ways or changing their methods of teaching. Why don't they think of how better they can teach children to read, add or even paint? This can make their daily work as teachers extremely challenging and exciting. We as educators do not recognize the meaning of real learning. There is a difference between what children appear to know, or are expected to know and what they really want to know. However, this does not mean that each child should be taught or learn what he wants but teachers should pay attention and develop the child more in whatever talent they show to possess. Learning is not necessarily only the three R’^s, it goes much beyond.

 

It is time that we analysed strategies that schools develop and apply in teaching. These strategies do a lot of harm to children because they raise fears in children; they produce learning, which is usually fragmentary, distorted and short-lived. Generally these strategies fail to meet the real needs of children.

In simpler words, schools do not provide the knowledge that will help in the future lives of these children. Schools should be places where children learn what they most want to know and not what teachers think they ought to know. Children should be allowed to learn naturally by following their curiosity, adding to their mental model of reality so that they can keep what they need and reject without fear or guilt what they do not need. 

Thus they grow in knowledge, in the love of learning as also in their ability to learn.

We at schools must keep striving to help kids achieve their inherent potential and actualize themselves. We must seek not to school a child but to educate him.  Let us be very clear that good teachers cost more and bad teachers cost all the more.

Tomorrow I’ll write on evolving effective strategies to help deal with the various aspects of a child’s education by seeking to breakdown traditional classroom antipathies and encouraging the open ended use of acquired skills amongst children.