As a parent there is always a desire, a wish that your child becomes a doctor, a pilot, a lawyer, a scientist, in short an outstanding successful person as a grown up adult. The aspirations about child’s future are a natural thinking for any parent.
To become a successful professional, good education is often a passport to a good future and naturally you choose the best school and motivate and encourage the child to work hard and pass the examinations with flying colors. As a parent you would encourage the child to take extra tuition classes to achieve good results. Good exams results mean good chances of admission in a high school, followed by admission at a good college or a university. With a university qualification the job is almost now secure.
I am not a teacher or educationalist nor a psychologist and I will now state may seem counter intuitive. I think that this aspirations and actions and attitude might be doing more harm than good to your child. We need understand and re-examine our fundamental assumptions.
In the first place, and one must have seen time and again that living for some distant future goal also means you do not live in the present. The distant goal such as exams – means children are focused to succeed in passing the exams while forgetting what it means to be a child- to be curious, mischievous, sometimes naughty, exploring, falling, getting up, relating, discovering, inventing, playing.
Childhood is very precious, precious enough not to be wasted by the artificial pressures of competition by spending endless hours of bookish study and score cards of the school which, in the final analysis, is only the number, first class, second class.
Very often we are driven by an assumption that education is the road map to success. Whilst this may be true given the state of socio/economic of our nation – where there is a thirst for good education, coupled with the desire to ensure that the child is as good and at good school- like the child next door, to my mind is a very narrow view of good education. The basic aim and indeed purpose of the school is to help and guide the child to discover herself and her world and to identify and nurture child’s hidden potentials rather than lie dormant. Just as every seed contains the future tree, each child is born with infinite potential. This is where the role of a teacher becomes challenging, where the seed (child) is constantly looked after by the gardener (the teacher) which bring out the hidden potential of the child to the fore.
This is very different from the view which sees the child as clay to be molded – where the teachers and parents are potters deciding what shape the clay should take. There is an old Chinese saying “Give a seed unto a potter and you will get a bonsai”.
As a parent, my request to all parents is “Do not give up your child’s present to secure his or her future. Provide your child with a lot of love and affection and enabling environment to explore life and world around him or her let the child blossom. You will discover over a period of time your child flowers into a creative and sensitive human being and when this happens everything else money, career, social success security will fall into place automatically. Let your child be a child. Your child has only one childhood- make it a memorable one.
