Love to learn vs Race to learn
Let me request you to do an activity today:
At home, ask your grandfather/grandmother (or whoever is the eldest in your family), what were the contents / topics they studied when they were in 1st grade / 6th grade / 10th grade, i.e. till 12th std. Let them share, whatever they remember.
I am amazed that how we’re so concerned about education, and again we’re the ones who’re killing the innate learning of our kids. Let me elaborate.
Today, there’s exorbitant pressure on kids to understand / learn things asap. The idea is to be fast in just about everything. And the content is up-scaled every year. The content which my cousin is studying in 4th grade, I studied that in 6th grade. We might think that owing to the fast-changing technology, and global competition, children need to cope up, but how many of us remember what we studied in 8th grade? Do we really need that today? Do we pick up the school books for reference? Ask yourself!
I learnt my first alphabets in kindergarten, now kids learn alphabets, and much more even before entering kindergarten (play schools). Truth is, we don’t want our kids to lag behind among their peers, do we?
And that is why, we do our best so that children be in the race.
This is what I am referring to as the “race to learn”.
This “race” is evidently detrimental to a child’s learning process. We got to understand that a child might take more time in reading language, and less time in arithmetic, or vice versa. You can not, or rather should not put the same time clock on every child’s head for every subject and declare them to obey, else call them a “failure”. Ludicrous !
But, what happens when you force learning. I will give you a recent example:
I met one of my friend’s sister sometime back; we were discussing about her son’s education. She told me that before she got her admitted to a school, her son, Arun, was very keen on reading new books. The mother and son used to visit a nearby library thrice a week where Arun used to read storybooks. Apparently, Arun started reading very early and just loved reading books.
But, after he joined school, he was dumped with so many books that he actually started hating reading itself. He was asked to read, what teachers wanted, when teachers, how much teachers wanted, and slowly (like all of us), Arun read for the sake of reading, not for the love of it!
PS: Please understand, if you follow the same routine, you’re not rearing a child, you’re building a machine, who will get into the routine of life like we have, and won’t even know what it was to cherish life !
