How happy is a student by himself/herself in a classroom? When we were students we used to love some teachers. We were very prompt in attending those classes. Why did we love those teachers so much and why did we attend those classes? Because those teachers fascinated our minds. We never wanted that class to get over. We wanted to hear them more and more. Either it was a fun factor or it was a passion factor to listen to them. We loved those teachers and we love them to this day.
Why did we love those teachers? Was it because they were great story tellers? Yes. Teachers are story tellers. How many stories our mothers used to recount to us? And what kind of stories did your mother tell you? And what type of stories did teachers recount in classes?
All those stories are fresh in our mind even today. We can recall those classes even today because those stories affected our inner soul. Whatever we remember, whatever we can think of are the things that we enjoy.
What should happen in a classroom? Each child’s heart should be ignited. Each child needs his own way to get ignited. If there are 30 students in a classroom, the teacher should have 30 ways, 30 stories, 30 stories to listen to and 30 stories to recount. And also 30 ways to ignite the mind! Only the teacher knows the talent of each child in the class and how to address him/her.
What makes the child unhappy in a classroom? If your workplace is slavery, you have to obey orders and work. While your heart is not involved, while your passion is not involved, your work will reflect it, and you will work for your salary. You will work for the day to be over to run away from the office.
So is the home. Is the husband liberated? Is the wife liberated? Or the maids liberated? Or the people in the home liberated? All are under orders. Wherever an order comes, what is lost is creativity, enjoyment, and happiness. Do you think that life would be better without orders? There should be orders, but those must be self-imposed, self-taken. Ownership of a job, ownership of learning, ownership of anything comes when it is self-imposed. You can take a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink the water. That applies to the classroom as well.
The Japanese were devastated in the Second World War. They were so passionate to work and bring it to the forefront of the world because they were passionate individually. Collaboration is a group passionating (sic) but if each child, each student, each individual if not passionated (sic) in owning a responsibility, that nation can never build by itself. It will take generations still it would not gain prosperity. This could be one of the problems of India today. All these go back to the classroom.
Was the teacher capable of igniting the passion of every child? The most simplest thing the teacher can do is not to teach. Yes … Don’t teach the child. That’s the first mistake a teacher makes. She/he comes into a classroom, starts lecturing, starts teaching concepts, and conducts revision – not once by thrice. The child is lost.
The child’s passion comes only when his inner self is ignited, inner self is excited. That happens only when a real life connection is made, when a real life skill is made, when a contribution to the real life happens. And then he learns everything there. If a teacher fails in these vital areas with regard to a child, that child is never liberated. That child hates learning . He/she waits for the bell to ring to run away from the classroom for a break, to smile, to enjoy, to be connected to nature. He/she will just run away and come back only when the bell rings for the next teacher to set in. And wait for that class to be finished because during those 45 minutes of interaction, it is a one-sided exercise where the teacher talks, he/she has nothing to do. Nothing to do, nothing to think, nothing to develop his thinking skills, passionate of or take ownership of.
Classrooms go unhappy because the teacher is imposing. Withdraw the imposing. Nowadays some of the schools for the want of 100% distinction are killing children. The school has taken a game to the parental community, the community where the school exists. ‘Come to my school, earn distinction.’ But have you generated a set of children who, without distinction, can own responsibility, can enjoy their work and ownership and became a useful person to the world?
You really don’t need a Mercedes car to travel. You don’t need the best of best homes to live in. You don’t need five-star food. Because you are happy in yourselves. You are happy in the work you do. You are happy in the way you do it. And you are happy in the way you collaborate it. So, the demands of the external pleasures of the happiness of life are gone.
The day we are all happy in our ownership, the day we are happy in our job, we will stop caring about how others travel, how others live because we are happy. When we were happy, did we think of our neighbour? No, we thought of ourselves. We thought about our neighbor only when we were unhappy about ourselves. And when do we become happy? When we are fully involved in our work. For instance, the happiness of the Chinese people is not in amassing wealth and discriminating among others and spoiling a community’s life. But their happiness is in the work they do.
A classroom must be for generations that live in the future world. The teacher should know how to make children take ownership of their job; how to own learning, how to be happy in learning, and how to explore learning. And it should not pressurise a child with a mark-based assessment.
As long as our schools are going to assess children, discriminate against children, pressurise children on a mark-based system, schooling is going to be unhappy. Mark is required for self-assessment. ‘How much have I learnt? How much more can I learn?’ It should not be for comparing and contrasting. If a school is taking examinations in that way, the school is killing the next generation.
