Children love to play games and enjoy being with their little companions at play schools. Instead, most of them are hooked to online games as a large number of working parents may not find adequate time to spend with their children. It is vital to make children play team games and sports in order to enhance their team skills. There are several schools without playgrounds today. What could happen to the physical fitness of our children? They are always instructed to concentrate on studies rather than sports. Education has to advocate all around development but today it is simply reduced to scorecards or career pathways in majority of our educational institutions. Child psychology is essential tool to nourish the creative challenges and emotional conflicts that a child faces while growing up during different phases of learning in life. Do we channelize their energy to work on a specific system of knowledge and skillset? Are they capable of traversing beyond the familiar limitations of our education through creative constructs of co-curriculum? Multiple intelligences play a huge role in shaping up the personality of every individual in our society only when our methods of education are highly customized in skill building processes through curriculum innovations and pedagogic reasoning.
There ought to be psychologists and occupational therapists in addition to special education experts doing their exemplary observation and review of every school and college/university through systematic and highly efficient performance ratings of every teacher and student in India. Our country has to come up with govt sponsored CBSE schools in every taluk of this country if India is serious about restructuring the system of quality education imparted across the country. The national ranking system of schools and colleges besides universities could be seriously considered by accounting all around development of students and their successful emergence as achievers. There should be a centralized system of fees collection proposed through banks in order to avoid all kinds of financial irregularities and discrepancies stifling the middle and lower classes from accessing the finest educational institutions.
We may review the nuances of criteria of scholarships and fellowships for every rural school and college through special focus on encouraging the first-generation learners or graduates at once. It is vital to extend our scholarships to the poorest children who struggle to get educated because of their impecunious antecedents because of caste, creed, race, language or religion too. Egalitarianism does not subscribe to any sort of discrimination or exploitation rather inclusive polity for all to breathe freedom and enjoy equal opportunities (even for the subalterns or economically backward categories) within the secular domain. It is essential to advocate equitable growth and socially progressive policy implementation in our system of education by establishing Govt run CBSE schools in every taluk. Most of the underprivileged do not get any opportunity to learn in the best schools of this country.
Have we systematized any sort of exclusivity with or without our knowledge? Can we transform our existing policies to incorporate inclusiveness in our school education? Is there any pattern of exploitation behind the sabotaging of the govt schools or govt aided schools by starting private educational institutions next to them? Do we really analyze such data and come up with comprehensive policy changes? We need to create opportunities for the specially-abled children to get high quality education everywhere. Every school should support such specially-abled children with a team of teachers who have mastered special education. Many of the visually challenged or auditorily challenged children are neglected without much support in our system. There are a large number of cerebral palsy children longing for education from a formal school. Several such children do not get any access to the nearest school, as their commutation or learning support system is not so conducive at the moment. Our society should also contemplate a lot about mentally retarded children, who may not find it easy to commute to schools every day because of social stigma. Their families may not sometimes be ready to treat them with dignity in rural or even in urban areas due to such notorious social dogmas of isolation. Do we really have any govt sponsored home schooling feasible for these children? It is high time to learn from the experience of advanced countries and their policy mechanisms in this regard. Why don’t we treat mentally challenged children with dignity and compassion? Experiential learning is an inseparable segment of integrated education. Divergent thinking gets enhanced only when we train our children to play with varieties of learning environments by imparting life skills and creative thinking with analytical reasoning.
Our social skills are quite often missed out in our learning zones. Regimentation and isolation cannot be allowed in the name of education to stifle the evolution of an individual. However, solitude is quintessential for anyone to emerge as a thinker. Classroom learning ought to be a source of absolute joy only when our children feel empowered and valued in participative learning. The limitations of any system of education may not be overcome in a short period of time. Our policy makers and statesmen may think about establishing a curriculum council in every taluk to study the existing framework of education and suggest effective solutions locally for several inexplicable challenges confronted by learners, teachers and the management of our educational institutions. There could be a specialist learning system to render quick support to first generation learners from rural areas. It is unwise to have Sundays as working days in some of these self-financing schools. Most of the teachers and students are under tremendous stress as the managerial authorities consider the institution as marks producing factories by making the students to study tenth even when they are in ninth standard. Rote learning is being promoted even when they are in eleventh standard by pressurizing the students to study the syllabus of twelfth standard. Everyone is responsible to transform our schooling through consultative management and joyous learning experience.
Mangalaprathaban Muralidharan is a corporate trainer, course developer and curriculum consultant.