Thinking is a powerful faculty of human mind. Education is a powerful tool to progress. We are living in an era in which education has become a stressful area of life for both children and parents. The need to excel and emerge victorious is every parent’s goal as much as it is for the child. The competition spirit is far exceeding the limits of endurance and reasonableness as more and more children feel stressed out and like a failure if they don’t get “high” grades while the benchmark for “high” grades only keeps increasing.
Even the best CBSE school or a top international school is primarily measured with the yardstick of its academic performance, or in other words, through ranks and such systems. There is no wrong in it, in fact this the mark of how good the educational institution is as a choice. But the method in which education in imparted and the systems being implemented differs within each group of the so-called acclaimed institutions. What sets apart the healthy mode of learning is the factors stressed upon during education.
Preschool education is often ignored or treated merely as a play school learning. But it is the basic and building block of the student’s interaction with learning, and is therefore of immense importance. If you look at the best matriculation school in Chennai or a top higher secondary school in Mumbai or any other competent school within the city, the learning curriculum may be similar or same. Developing a humane attitude and instilling in the child’s mind about education as a need and an interesting means to personal development is the point of true success for a school.
While most schools do not succeed, even if they do at the obvious & surface levels, there are sadly only a few which actually make an impact in encouraging children towards stress-free education and making education interesting for them. Only the best of faculty can really “train the minds to think”. All of us have both good and bad things to say about the educational system. But we do not take steps to make the good things better and converting the bad things into good. The lion’s share of economic progress may be attributed to education. The awareness created by education makes for analysis and utilization of better opportunities. Good investments too are the results of wise learning. It is therefore the oil for the wheel of progress.
To curb the trend of increasing numbers of students’ suicides and to make education interesting to children, they need to be first taught to appreciate knowledge and learning as an activity. Children should be treated with respect as growing individuals and not as high-score brewing machines. Their unique talents or inclinations to a healthy and creative aspect of one’s personality has to be appreciated and allowed to be developed. Only a well-experienced teacher can bring out the best resources of a student and help him or her identify strengths and lacking nodes. Atleast 90% of us would agree to the fact that we never found education interesting during our schooldays, irrespective of whether 10 years or 50 years back. It was always either a role-model teacher or a teacher friend who made us realize the value of education and helped us understand the seemingly insurmountable subjects. To some of us it could have been mathematics, to a few others it could have been science and so on.
Teaching is one of the noblest professions in the world. Making it nobler is the power of teaching fraternity. Systems, practices and attitude of imparting education can make a significant change and influence students’ lives. This change can emerge to be a sea change in shaping the tomorrow of the child and the society in which he or she lives in and will continue to be a part of. Thus it becomes a social responsibility rather a collective one to make education interesting to children so that they do not stop with asking questions but also arrive at the answers themselves, with proper guidance in the right direction.