Waking up a child on a sweltering Monday morning at 6 and then send him yelling to the shower can be the closest one can go to hell. The child is then bribed with offers of a toy and a book and a couple of game CDs if he would go to school daily without crying ..His sobs subside but it is enough to leave you guilty for the whole day.
You decide to leave for office only after he returns. That leaves you even guiltier ...
And then when he comes back at 2, he again takes a shower, is fed lunch and is sent off to sleep. He wakes up by six and watches TV and when I return around nine he does some revision and homework and we are ready to sleep again...
What a life we have given our children!
And the last thing my son said when he wailed in the morning was that I should not go to work. I was wondering what was the connection between that and his having to go to school.
I did give my six year old the usual explanation...I have to work if we have to live in this new house, (no matter how this and the other concrete structures bake themselves hot like hell fire every day, and no matter that these have come up replacing acres of green fields and trees which could have made the summer more bearable) if we have to pay for the internet, if we have to pay the power bills, if we have to buy a new Ben 10 toy....
And he has to study if he has to work when he grows up...
People who have grown up in cities are people with no choices. If we were to want to abandon the city dwelling and city ways and go and live in the villages you would not know how to.
Shouldnt the education system equip children to have their feet in both worlds so that have a choice when they grow up?
Shouldnt the urban schools be linked to village schools and urban homes be linked to village homes? So children can grow up in both terrains. They could live a few years in village schools and learn to cultiavate and grow food, learn to weave and generally develop the basic tools to live even if they had no jobs...Many urban parents are paying up to Rs 40,000 as term fees in Delhi. Mine comes to Rs 14000 in the first term and half in the rest...this could instead be shared with government run schools in the villages and with homes of parents in those villages... And in cities they could learn how to repair vehicles, how to make basic tools...There should be craft and workshops attachd to the city schools, Children love tinkering with devices...they want to know how it is made..But years and years of caging them in classrooms with monotonous and often irrelevant lessons in geography, maths and science without linking them with life, they grow up into people who have no idea why they spent 15 years in school.
When will this change?
Why do we need nice buildings, coloured chairs and tables, and all the other things that the government wants to spend money on...Have many shady mango and jackfruit trees instead and many thatched huts to keep the children rooted to simplicity and its need. Of course there can be a laboratory and a library and a workshop....Let the government which is reluctant to spend six per cent of GDP on education spent even less. Let it spend instead its thoughts ...Let it invest in thoughts.... Let not the purpose of education be to create people capable of making more money that than parents did...
Let the purpose of education be to see and feel and love this planet....and make the child curious enough to learn more...What is needed is a revolution in thought. And this is possible only if the youth are involved.
We need people from the age of 17 to 27 to be part of the core team of decision and policy making in all governments....They should also be the core team of implementers....
They will change this country... For the old men and women of this country seems to have reached a point of bankruptcy as far as thoughts go....They seem to be slaves and victims of the pursuit of money making....
The only purpse of this government and all others who talk government is to increase the GDP...Why is no one talking of making do with less?
Why has that become out of circulation? Was it such a bad idea?
