2020…
True to its name, this year has shown us, with crystal clarity, many aspects of our lives and lifestyle through a fresh, new and improved lens!
And with regards to the education system, worldwide, this is what we learnt:
1) At a time of global crisis, the education process was temporarily halted as it was not classified as an ‘essential’, and could easily be survived without.
2) When the entire population of the world was faced with one common enemy, the ‘greatest minds’ from the most globally coveted, expensive educational institutions, could not come up with any solution for mankind and were suspiciously silent as they watched lives and economies crumble.
If these facts don’t awaken the protective instinct in every parent, I don’t know what will?!
Once Corona is behind us, and I hope that day comes soon, do we intend to resume subjecting our children to the intense, competitive circus that was their lives, while we fall back into our complacent ritual of acceptance?
Do we simply revert to not challenging a system of education, just because it has existed for generations?
For decades we have gone along with a now redundant, borderline inhuman, education system, globally, because we truly believed it was working. Somewhere in our brainwashed minds, we imagined it was sieving human beings through some magical process of intellectual sedimentation, leaving dead weight at the bottom and allowing genius to rise to the top of the human chain.
Every single year, in our quest for the ‘great parenting’ tag, we suppressed our natural instincts…succumbing to societal pressure and trusted this was the only way to determine the path of our children’s future.
So we lied. We lied to our own children….parroting and reinforcing what we had heard from society, from the ministry of education, from previous generations, and our peers.
‘It’s for your own good.’
‘You need good grades, and you need to be competitive’
‘Back-to-back classes, tuitions, presentations, study groups, essays, submissions, examinations, and years of memorised curriculum…are all a step in the right direction, to hopefully secure a seat in an Ivy League university.’
But with every passing year, the pressure compounded…each generation raising the bar higher than the previous one. Little by little, at first, so we didn’t even notice…until suddenly, the very purpose of education had been grossly distorted!
What was meant to be the imparting of knowledge to young minds…had now become the brutal massacre of a child’s self-worth in a pressure cooker of unimagined proportions.
But what a great leveller and humbler Corona has been! When it came down to a matter of life and death, our saviours, the ones who carried us through to the other side…the people we depended on, were the ones who did not all boast of decorated resumès…
…our community service personnel.
They just knew how to do their job, no matter how simple, even in the face of danger. While the rest of us hid, they showed up! And that’s all it really took to keep the world running.
Therefore…I cannot do it anymore. I can no longer lie to my children!
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not because I’m taking a dramatic stand here! Because I know I can quite easily be brainwashed again! I literally am that gullible and hungry for society’s approval.
But the real reason I can no longer lie, is because my children now know the truth!
A gift to them from a year that has taken so much from mankind.
Our children now know that the world moves on, quite well in fact, without them actually giving that final.
They now know that every celebration, family dinner, friend’s birthday, vacation or movie that they were made to sacrifice in preparation for some dreaded exam or the other, was actually quite unnecessary.
They witnessed firsthand that when all the adults of the world agree, if everyone has the will, the concept of exams can be made redundant overnight!
Students have been promoted, and accepted into different schools and universities simply based on average performances, aggregates and predicted scores.
Sure, they may argue that it’s not an accurate reflection of the child’s work…but it can be done!
So as a parent, if I don’t ask this question now, when the entire world is in the process of rebooting and reworking their ways, I’d be failing miserably at my job!
My maternal instinct now demands that, if this level of examination pressure, is truly not an ‘essential’…reduce it!
Through this system of procuring the best grades, we have inadvertently been teaching our children that real success refers only to the earning of tangible tender through individual hard work. What begins with the competitive pursuit of grades turns into the lifelong chase of money and comparisons.
But the need of the hour is for our children to receive simplified information on how things work, which satisfies their thirst of curiosity.
What is mandatory is for them to know how to get through life with wisdom, sanity and good cheer.
1) The teaching community worldwide needs to devise ways to focus on topics such as:
- yoga, exercise, meditation,
- common sense (surprising how uncommon it is),
- good values and lessons in humanity, equality and ethics,
- how to keep calm in crunch situations,
- how to cope with adversity,
- street smartness,
- sportsmanship and team spirit,
- how to handle both success and failure,
- how to best deal with confrontation politely and diplomatically,
- how to be respectful to all and still get your way,
- to understand that equality leaves no room for privilege.
2) Marks and predicted scores must be earned for life skills and emotional quotient and not for an unreasonably intense curriculum that must be completed within an unnecessary deadline.
3) The pointless memorisation of facts and figures in this age of technology and information overload, should be regarded as the extra curricular.
4) Maybe examinations could be offered as an option, for only those students seeking the top spot in class or at the time of admission, into and by the university.
I’m not an educationalist, simply a parent. So I may not have all the answers but it IS my job to ask all the necessary questions.
If there’s one thing I learnt as a student of economics, it is the principal of demand and supply. If we parents don’t demand it now…the supply of a different tomorrow will never come!
Are we capable of acing this test for our children?!
Sunset Effect - Nitya Satyani 