20th March 2019 Comments 0 Feedbacks on “Don’t tell your child what to do!” |By Admin

Don’t tell your child what to do!-Bhuvi’s Academy

 I wondered while I was writing an article for a journal sometime back when I was in Canada, as to why two year olds master a strange language, (their mother tongue – now before people start telling me that mother tongue is not a strange tongue, I can quote the works of several reputed developmental psychologists that every language is a strange tongue to a newborn), acquire enough mathematical skills to immediately judge that their brothers or sisters were given one more toffee that they were, learn enough civics to know who is what in the family and whom to ask for a toffee or whose lap to cry at while they stop learning further similar skills the moment they start school.

 In school, even very highly rated English medium schools, children struggle with proper usage and grammar, maths becomes a subject that is so viciously hated that some even commit suicide over it, and many children end up half insane, by the time they leave school.

 I can and will talk in far more detail about our schooling system sometime later, but this post is not about ‘our’ or ‘their’ schooling system. It is about schools in general.

  Consider a child who loves sweets – most of the children do. Imagine a bell ringing at 7:00 AM and the children have to get dressed and pray and sit on benches in rows and columns. A teacher stands in front while they are all served ladoos at 7:05 AM and have to keep on eating them till 7:45 AM while the teacher raps on the knuckles of the child if she/he stops eating just for a moment. At 7:45 the “Rasagulla” period starts…..you get the idea. So it goes on upto 3:00 PM. Which child do you think will even dare to love sweets from the next day?

  Or consider an alcoholic who loves his several pegs of malted whiskey every evening. Suppose such a person is asked to report for duty at 9:00 AM shaved, showered, suited and booted and take his seat comfortably in an air conditionered cabin. A woman comes and serves him a strong whiskey, which he quickly finishes. She pours out one more. This goes on for several hours by which time he passes out. His head is then dunked in water and he is shaken up and he is again served a strong whiskey. He has to keep drinking till 6 PM. If this is not a sure cure for alcoholism, I wonder what is.

  Disciplining an action and forcing you to do it a little too much, however pleasurable it might be, creates in you a strong aversion for it. That is what schools are doing these days. However much you may cloak it in rosy pedagogical packages, children are NOT GOING TO LEARN what you teach them.

  Please note that during this same time they learn very well to smoke, drink, have sex or write stories, poems, dance, paint, take photographs, develop Android apps or sing, because you do not poke your noses. The moment you start taking a class on how to have sex or how to smoke pot, they will quit that too.

Thanks: N. Ramdas Iyer, Bhuvaneshwar Dharmalingam