A Different School of Thought – Schooling for Marks or Schooling for Growth?

One reason I love burrowing through attics where old junk is stored is the anticipation of finding lost and hidden treasures. The dust, dirt and the scare of scurrying mice, lizards and cockroaches do act as speed-breakers to my enthusiasm, but I plough on because of what I hope to find. No, it’s not that my ancestors were pirates or bank robbers who had hidden piles of loot somewhere and passed on only rumors and stories of their exploits down the generations; it’s not gold, silver or even money that I’m looking for – my sole intent is to find books and comics, the kind that made my childhood memorable and enjoyable and which you don’t get in bookstores today (even if you do get them in the revised versions, they are so damn expensive that you prefer to download the e-versions, if available, and read them on your Kindle).

So as I was going through one such room on a trip to my parents’, helped ably by my brother, sister and cousin, we came across a whole lot of comics and something I hadn’t bargained on – my old school project. To the others, it was just a shabby book, covered in peeling brown paper and filled with yellowing pages, fading pictures and the writing of an earnest 9-year-old, but in my eyes, it was the work of a whole holiday, a month or so, in which I searched for relevant pictures from the magazines and newspapers that my dad used to buy, and built up a collection to submit for my project at school.

I was in the fourth grade, and we had been asked to compile an album of the highlights of India and its states. The pictures were not uniform, the writing was not bad but my siblings still teased me about the odd spelling mistake (mainly because of what I do for a living today), and to sum up, the album was definitely not something any kid of today would submit. I was ribbed for a while about the fact that I had included a picture of a television under the page “Communication”, and about how sparse the content was.

But, in spite of it all, I brought the album back home with me, because, truth be told, it was painstakingly compiled 25 years ago, without access to any of the resources we have today (Google and the Internet have sure made life a thousand times easier for parents looking to help their kids with school projects), and most important of all, without the help of any adult. Just for that last fact alone, it was invaluable to me.

Today’s kids have a plethora of options at their disposal; even so, it pains me to realize that they seem to have lost the one thing that really matters – independence and the power to think for themselves. In the rat-race of competitions and parents wanting their child to stand “first” rather than improve themselves, to score “marks” rather than actually learn something, every school project becomes a sort of contest between the parents. And at the end of the day, it’s the ones who can afford to spend the most money, the most time, and the most effort who finish ahead of the rest.

In all this confusion, the kids are left by the wayside; they grow up without tapping into their creative side, without discovering where their talents and abilities lie, and unable to take decisions and do things on their own, always looking to their parents to take care of everything for them. Even the parents who don’t want to get on this bandwagon are forced to do so when they see that their children are disappointed at not winning any prizes. And this is why I lay the blame solely on the shoulders of the school; are they so stupid that they do not know what a child of a certain age is or is not capable of? To solve the problem of parent interference, they either need to judge more carefully when deciding winners, or they need to conduct contests that are held at school where the parents are not around. Only then will they be imparting an education to the kids and not just teaching them to “score high marks.”

But as neither of these options is going to be happening any time soon (or in the future), I think I’ll just hold on to my album as an item of historic value, one that I probably will never see again!

Food For The Soul…

This blog was born when I saw eyebrows being raised when I told people that I wrote for a living, yet did not have a blog of my own. But, as you can see, after an enthusiastic start, I’ve neglected it for close to a year. The problem with writing for a living is that you really don’t feel like writing for fun. Yes, you do have thoughts and ideas that beg to be put down in your creative style, but by the time you’re done with work for the day, all you feel like doing is switching off your notebook and switching on the TV, curling up with a book or catching up with friends and family.

But when the writing bug is in you, it never lets go, as I realized today. The dormant germ hibernating inside all this time was suddenly awakened today (no particular reason), and I decided to dust this blog and bring it back to life. Only after I started to write (the next article) did I realize why I needed to continue with this, why I needed to write for myself and not just for work alone – it’s because you need to feed not just your stomach, but also your soul.

So I begin anew, and I hope that the process of nurturing my soul does not take too long a break being relegated to the backseat in the hustle and bustle of everyday responsibilities.