These are the extract of Multiworld Newsletter.
Lets rethink what we are doing in Schools..
The
news is official. Schools are producing asses. After an average study
of 12 years (sometimes, 14) in school, children are turning out duds.The
schooling system in the USA, India, Malaysia, Africa,everywhere is
producing largely unimaginative and boring products, lacking initiative
completely.
A
recent Consumers Association of Penang booklet on How School Affects
Your Kids lists the ways in which schools and their mug-mentality harm
children. The school is perceived by children as:
A world of silence and immobility;
A world of uniforms, uniformity and punishments;
A world cut off from life;
A world of strange objects not found in the natural world;
A world strewn with obstacles and meaningless tasks;
A prison where students learn inferiority, submission and fear.
A world of silence and immobility;
A world of uniforms, uniformity and punishments;
A world cut off from life;
A world of strange objects not found in the natural world;
A world strewn with obstacles and meaningless tasks;
A prison where students learn inferiority, submission and fear.
None of these are disputable facts.
Children
themselves have drawn our attention to the fact that the school
completely resembles a prison. It follows timings; food is bad or the
same everyday; permission is required for everything including going to
the loo; schooling demands that one sit in the same position for hours
without exercise (even prisoners are spared this punishment). All
children love intervals, just as prisoners look forward to the short
breaks they are given out of their cells. Teachers are mostly wardens,
since all they are really concerned about is discipline, uniforms,
cleanliness, silence, obedience. Many of them are mean.
The
comparison should not be really surprising since the same people who
designed the schooling system also designed the prison system.
Parents who claim to love their children are
willing to submit them to a 12 year torture learning things that
everyone forgets immediately after the examinations are over.
Children
who remain out of school do not lose anything since all human beings
learn better out of school, given their natural aptitudes to do this.
Thus, children can learn three to four languages before they are six
without a teacher, but cannot speak or write a language if it is taught
to them in school, even after six or eight years!
Taleemnet
is providing a much needed platform for parents and educators who
realise that although keeping kids out of school may initially seem
risky, maybe frightening or even more of trouble, it will bring
inestimable benefits in the long term in terms of quicker learning, and
better family ties as children have a greater opportunity to be with
their parents, members of the community, relatives and friends — all of
whom will contribute in one way or another to the learning process.
One
of the first Taleemnet projects is a primer on how to unschool kids or
help the present ‘walk out’ rates to increase, so that children have a
better chance to be themselves and learn what they want to rather than
having to submit to a programme of text book cramming that goes on year
after year without respite and whose utility is not accepted by anyone
including the teacher.
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