On Children’s Day, can we imagine a system that values empathy, not just exams?

 

Education should be about cooperative growth, managing feelings and differences – not passing exams.

Some time ago, a group of high-school students were asked to name their greatest fear. “…being scolded for what I did accidentally,” “ …being rejected by friends,” “ that I’ll fail ,” “losing my temper,” “…disappointing my parents.”

Had these things had been discussed in class?

Silence.

Children need to share their worries and doubts, talk about why they get angry or cannot control themselves. Though every adult knows that an emotionally stable child will be a more focused student, such is the tyranny of expectation that most teachers are too hard worked and weary to tell their managements that a child’s understanding of himself is as important as his grasp of academic subjects.

When universal education based on textbooks was introduced into an oral and traditional culture like ours, it had no room for an attendant mentoring the development of a student’s personality. No one thought children needed anything other than order and discipline. The more the student studied the more distanced he became from his natural environment, community and native culture. This tradition has continued with the entire training between the child’s 5th and 15th years concentrated on the material world around her about which she is relentlessly tested. The higher order of thinking skills — dare one say spiritual growth, a zone of intimacy impossible to describe but in need of discussion — has faded. Education has become a way of life to pass examinations.

Children need to share their worries and doubts, talk about why they get angry or cannot control themselves. Though every adult knows that an emotionally stable child will be a more focused student, such is the tyranny of expectation that most teachers are too hard worked and weary to tell their managements that a child’s understanding of himself is as important as his grasp of academic subjects.

When universal education based on textbooks was introduced into an oral and traditional culture like ours, it had no room for an attendant mentoring the development of a student’s personality. No one thought children needed anything other than order and discipline. The more the student studied the more distanced he became from his natural environment, community and native culture. This tradition has continued with the entire training between the child’s 5th and 15th years concentrated on the material world around her about which she is relentlessly tested. The higher order of thinking skills — dare one say spiritual growth, a zone of intimacy impossible to describe but in need of discussion — has faded. Education has become a way of life to pass examinations.

Over the last decade or so, as teenage suicides and child-against-child violence began to rise, a question has repeated itself:

On the road to academic excellence, did we miss something? We know that we cannot reverse this system but surely, we can modify it with the support of teachers and other stakeholders. In a civilised society (and we congratulate ourselves endlessly about our heritage) each generation is expected to make the society better and safer for the next one. Hence, the tremendous societal role schools have. Training in understanding the value of cooperative growth, empathy and managing feelings and differences has to start early. Countless hours have been spent discussing how personal and social transformation is possible through a well-designed course on social and personal ethics. Hardly anything is said about training the teachers, the agents of awakening.

Recently, I watched a video describing millennials and their socio-emotional disabilities. A chilling list of features: Entitlement, self-obsession, narcissism, low tolerance, inability to focus on anything for any length of time. This might well be true of some of them but not all of them. Many youngsters everywhere are responding warmly to outreach messages for help. Any request sent out on behalf of students in distress or appeals for food or donations to animal shelters is almost immediately met with a flood of calls and assurances. Some of the respondees are school goers.

What does that tell us? Someone inspired them. Something other than their textbooks brought out the best in them. A routine counter to the idea that values can be taught is that they can only be imbibed (“We learnt from our parents.”) But what if family members are too busy to spend time with children?

A policy to foster the idea and importance of the self in harmony with wider and wider circles can be implemented through schools to influence at least those children who get to attend school who will one day lead their communities and society; they will write and teach, build cities, patent new medicines and technologies; they will enact policies and laws.

This is especially important when millions of Indian children below the age of 10 have no hope of an education. Disadvantaged by illiteracy, they are vulnerable to all the negative forces around them. Doesn’t that leave the rest of us with a duty to overcome our limited knowledge based on traditions and prejudices? The intense competition that contemporary life fosters has already left many youngsters with no inner resources to counter anxiety, fear and rage. Some young children are so lonely and edgy they take their own lives when they fail entrance exams, do not get the kind of clothes they want or feel inadequate in English-language classes. It is clear that the skills necessary to manage feelings of anger and disappointment have become extremely urgent and are as important as academic achievement. No single plan of action will fit everyone. Each region, possibly individual schools in consultation with neighbouring institutions, will need to devise what works for them.

Educating for peace seeks to nurture a moral vision about the role of the self in the family, society, nation and the world. A six-year-old cannot understand the term social justice. A 14-year-old can and must. But the former can understand the idea of sharing and fairness, which in turn will develop into a grasp of what the latter understands in five seconds. An eight-year-old can only be told that he must not destroy leaves and plants for fun or stone a pup for fun. A 15- year-old understands that leaves, birds, insects, people and climate are all linked. If we are to survive on an impoverished planet that cannot manage its food-stocks or famines, its water resources or forests, we must, as quickly as possible, see ourselves as a global family and sensitise children to understand that what affects one group in one part of the world, will eventually affect everyone everywhere else. We have already learnt how to make children healthier but we have paid less attention to their hearts and minds.

Surely the goal of education is to equip people to lead meaningful lives and not only to make a living.

Written by Mini Krishnan

The writer was Editor, Translations, at Oxford University Press and Macmillan India and currently co-ordinates a project of translations for the Tamil Nadu Textbook & Educational Services Corporation.

Source: Indian Express, 14/11/22