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Friday, September 27, 2013

Allow the Young to Think for Themselves

Editorial -
What Sikkim requires its schools to create are sensible citizens who can think for themselves, analyse situations, weigh options and make practical decisions. If education was approached with this end in mind, the quality that everyone seeks to infuse into the system will also become a reality. What the present system delivers, force-feeds in fact, and this is an all-India scale malaise, is contagious indecisiveness. This indecisiveness does not mean that students have been made more confident and clear, instead, the indecisiveness is inflicted on their instinctive inquisitiveness. Too many classrooms discourage children from speaking up and too many teachers opt to indoctrinate students instead of facilitating discovery. Education is being regimented too early and learning structured even before children decide why they want to learn. It is rare to find students with wide-ranging interests anymore. And even when the young show flashes of interest beyond the curriculum, these are almost always immediately directed by the elders or teachers. Increasingly, even hobbies and games are being decided for the children. Student projects for interschool competitions are invariably prepared by teachers [just as homework and exams are more about parents] and every intonation of a poetry recital for competitions dictated to them. More and more teachers, despite even the recent confusion of CCE, are so scared that students will fail them that they end up spoon-feeding them. At the other extreme are teachers who see no hope for or in their students, so they don’t get involved either and make no efforts to add some life to the uninspired syllabus. Through either scenario, the student meets the same fate – a confidence slapped down even before it could grow. A good way to start delivering Sikkim a more confident, less disinterested generation would be by allowing students to discover some things by themselves and in doing so, they will also discover the confidence required to think and decide for themselves later in life. Unfortunately, at a stage when the planners should be devising ways and means to allow the next generation more individuality, unpardonable experiments at infantilizing grown-ups by ordering them into uniforms for college have been allowed to happen and stay…

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