| Article first published as Are Schools Really Seats of Learning? on Blogcritics. |
Schools are seats of learning. They should inculcate values and establish reason while imparting education. The personality, as a whole, should undergo a development.
The child in school has to blossom into a beautiful individual endowed with refinement and sharpened wit. Academic excellence alone should not be the prime criterion, as it can be anybody’s achievement once you rely on learning by rote, revisiting the subjects often, and taking innumerable tests and examinations. Top grades have become the targets of modern schools, which try to churn out products in quantity tagged with high scores, very much akin to industries producing goods.
Industry aims at profit and looks out for competition. If the industrial houses slacken their productivity their existence in this highly competitive world becomes a question mark. They have to service loans borrowed from financial institutions, pay wages to their workers, buy raw materials, maintain quality, pay power charges, and spend on research and building infrastructure to survive in the marketplace. As their demands are high, they concentrate on production.
Schools do not have such compulsions. Production should not be their aim. Quality should come first. The teacher should teach the child in depth, not look into the grades. The pupil should understand the subject before he or she is tested on it. The child should enjoy learning, which leads to a love of the subject. It is the teacher who makes a lesson interesting or boring. A monotonous lecture confined to the subject renders it extremely uninteresting. An hour of lecture should contain a pep talk, a discussion relevant to the subject, then take up the core lesson followed by a short question and answer period.
The last period of every school day should be allotted to games, moral science, library, hand work, debating, and quizzing. The students’ work should be displayed in the classroom ando remain there for the term. Parents should be invited to see their child’s performance. This would develop bonding, a grip over the child, and a rapport with the teachers.
How many schools do these things? The child right from kindergarten is subject to tests. Examinations bring in fear. The small child undergoes a tedium that robs him of his childhood fancy and imagination. He becomes a live gadget and assumes a mechanical style of living. He gets up in the morning, rushes to school, listens to the teachers, comes back home, does homework, and prepares for tests. His eyes automatically close, leaving him a hapless child devoid of freedom and enjoyment.
The parental pressure on the child is enormous. They impose their aspirations on him. They want him to become an engineer or a medical professional so that he can turn out to be an income generating machine. The child has no choice. He has to obey his parents. The child has to study irrespective of his wishes, and graduates as an engineer or doctor. Thus begins his ordeal of making money. He does so and builds wealth. He has sacrificed his interests and love. He has lost his childhood happiness which will never come back at any price.
Nowadays schools are run as businesses. Education has become expensive. It is an economic novelty bound by no principles. It is a great money spinner. Many with little education establish schools, as they yield enormous revenue. The world has found a technique based not on science or commerce, but on the fundamentals of desire and greed.
Schools are apparently great enchanters attracting the public with their intrigue and seducing them by their fanciful advertisements and misleading pro formas.
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