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Learning from
Children: What to teach them
Education, we are told, is not filing of a vessel but the lighting of a lamp. However, we- teachers, parents, authorities, society hardly follow this dictum in our education system. Somewhere down the ages, we forgot that the aim of teaching is holistic development of the child and not only scholastic achievement in examinations. Education became a tool to achieve a good lifestyle and not to lead a good life. We failed to exploit several opportunities even in our routine education that could have given the children a chance to grow up to be well-balanced, sensitive citizens of the world. This book presents an effort of the author to evolve strategies for the promotion of development of a child in different domains of motor, cognitive, language, emotional, social and moral skills. The research project was done with about 1,800 children studying in classes 1 to 9 in 15 rural schools and nine tribal schools in Karnataka. The intervention was in the form of workshops on song, dance, artwork, language, games, sports and drama. Teachers of the schools were imparted special training to hold these activities during routine classroom hours. Emphasis was on involving the children and let them lead to the ways through which maximum learning takes place. The outcome generated a lot of valuable knowledge, information and data along with the confirmation of the obvious fact that involving children in the process of education always prove to be more effective than teachers acting as one-way instructors. In spite of the book being a detailed presentation of the project, it is not written in a cut and dry way. Reporting of several incidents such as—many schools had to be closed early because elephants strayed into the villages or that the project work had to be stopped mid way for sometime because of the Veerappan killing episode—adds a typically Indian context to the contents, makes the reading lively and also tells bout the sensitivity of the researcher towards the environment in which she is working. We also get to know about the families and communities of the students involved in the project, implying that education is not an isolated exercise but has to be seen in a complete context. The study is comprehensively designed and the results are exhaustively conveyed with enough statistical analysis, tables and questionnaires to help in replication of the experiment anywhere else in the country. However, the format of the book is quite complex and one has to do a lot of page-turning back and forth to comprehend the complete project design and its implications. Flow charts, simple diagrams, tables, highlights, headings, avoidance of repetitions could have made the book a treasured guide for researchers, academicians and policy makers alike. Repetitions at some places (page no. 89,98) have not been weeded out. A geographical map of the area under study would have helped. There are minor mistakes in references. Malavika Kapur has been with the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore and has a long and distinguished experience in the field of child mental health. It is heartening to know that senior professors like her are taking up such basic issues, that too in remote areas. The appreciable aspect is that it is not another armchair research work but the book has arisen out of a functional, active and live programme involving teachers, government officials and students at the grassroots level. Reading about such laudable indigenous works one cannot help but feel sad about the irony of so much knowledge and so less implementation that plagues the development of our country. Let us hope and pray that people who matter do take note of such rich ideas and incorporate the innovations in the routine process.
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Bloody shoot outs in
schools, suicides by adolescents, students turning chaotic, arrogant and
aggressive! Where are we leading our children? We are giving them the
best schooling, luxuries and comforts but denying them their mental
sanity.