The above sight of a school going child on a Saturday morning, while she was waiting for her school bus to arrive in a village in north India, brought some disturbing thoughts in my mind.
The girl was reading from her note book; probably she might have an examination on that day. The learning and appraisal processes in our educational system are outdated. The emphasis is still on acquiring and remembering information and not necessarily in application and analysis of the information. So compulsion to memorise facts is heavy on children.
The grading system is based on a scoring system of remembering facts and does not cover the domains of thinking, processing and original enquiry. The learning appraisal process is largely outdated even in the professional courses. The entrance test to post graduate learning in medical subjects contains about seventy percent of factual questions. I wish majority of questions were clinical scenarios which the candidates had to process and illustrate to get an idea of the skills of observation, thinking, planning and bedside care of person with an illness.
The bag hanging on her shoulder was large and appeared heavy. That is an other dimension of load she carries with her-more than the weight of the books in the bag, it is the burden of learning!
'Learning without burden' is essential to make childhood experience a pleasant and transitional experience of growing up, feeling the charm of knowing and discovering!
I have an apology to make to children, who feel the stress of learning. I lived hoping for that least sixty years, since I finished by elementary school education that the school education would become child friendly and exploratory! The teaching process might have moved on to using technology of communication through the visual and auditory media, but in content and in the methodology of learning, it is heavily loaded towards acquiring information.
I find a comment in the educational circle that the learning related difficulties are on the increase in school going children. In fact, many schools have a resource room with adaptations to help children to adjust to, when the group learning in a regular class room is difficult. Some children receive help through shadow teachers who interpret for them what is taught in the class. Some other children receive a one-to-one learning support when the regular class rooms demands intimidate children to become inattentive and disruptive.
The educational reforms in the last thirty years in India addressed to create better class room facility, upbuilding the capacity of teachers with more focus on the psychology of learning and and revising the syllabus to make it relevant and contemporary. But what was not addressed adequately, is to bring back the learning process to stimulate enquiry, observation, thinking and exploration.
During a nature walk with a nine years old child, the question he asked me impressed me about his sense of curiosity and enquiry on all that he saw, heard and felt during the walk.
He looked surprised by the size, colour, contour of different birds and raised enquiring questions about their habitat, food and nesting patterns. At the end of an hour long walk, his question to me was, 'Why can't we learn by observation, conversation and doing activities to understand than just memorise facts?'
Let me share this rose flower with all school going children to bring cheer to your learning process, with an apology that we as adults are yet to find ways to make learning easier for you. How to make a learning an enlarging and motivating experience for children is a challenge in formal school education! Till that time, when children can find their formal learning process at school a natural choice and a comfortable process, we are to be in relentless efforts to match the learning process to the aspirations of childhood.
The other major factor that influences pre-school children to be school ready is parenting attention they receive at home. It is towards promoting this thought process and practice of parenting, Anna and I recently brought out a dialogue starter on parenting of pre-school children.
The traditional parenting practices arising out of attachment behaviour between parents and children need an affirming approach. There are a few disruptive forces which increase the distance and cordiality between parents and children. The media, with is entertainment flavour upon parents and children, the internet digital technology of games and multiple social media, and the digital communication which reduces interface of interactive and social nearness, are some of those influences which seem to create a new paradigm in parenting approach. The digital world is displacing our social interface, which means that the growth and development process of childhood hitherto well defined by child development sequences, are likely to be reformulated to adapt to the influences of the digital world!
I hear and read thoughts in this direction. Instead of defining 'stranger anxiety, stranger awareness, socialisation', which are developmental sequences from nine months to eighteen months of a child would be now defined by an infant's or toddlers' awareness of comical figures, their movements, communication, profile and behaviour in the visual screen. A real world of people, play, nature and homely events might get displaced by the child's ability to be familiar with the 'animated world' of childhood in the media.
In this context of change, and transition to occupy children in the digital interface that parents are getting more comfortable with, the booklet below is a voice of concern, we raise with some thoughts to favour and raise advocacy for social childhood for pre-school children! We hope parens are at the heart of initiating pre-school children to their learning journey and the visual media becomes a tool to make the learning broad based, and not a substitute!
The above booklet, Parenting Presence introduces fifty topics, which parents of pre-school children are invited to consider, explore and experience, while nurturing children.
The formation of a pre-school child is a process where the home and the relationships related to the home carry a major influence. It is this which is explored with comments and clarifications with the intention of making pre-school children school ready and parents to become partners in transition of a pre-school child from the home to the formal learning at school.
As adults we owe a lot to help children to begin their life experience at home to be pleasant and upbuilding and turn the schooling experience to unfold the person resident in a child!
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
No comments:
Post a Comment