Why schools fail to ignite young minds

Some students fear going to school. The biggest challenge when I was a student was the fear of the school. Truly speaking, it was a journey from happiness at home to the unhappiness of the school. Why was I unhappy at the school? If I was happy at home who took away my happiness in the school? How many of us really waited for a day off? How happy we were when it was raining heavily and schools called off. We used to celebrate it. How happy were we when the examinations were over; or when the class teacher was absent, and we could play. And how unhappy we were when schools reopened.

If education is for my benefit, if education is for my career building, if education is to help me to find a job, like my parents who lived before me, then why doesn’t education give happiness to me? This is a big question. Being a grown up person today, if I understand the problem associated with this issue at least it will help the next generation of children to be happy to go to school.

We are happy to be at home. We meet and interact with our mom, dad, brothers, sisters, relatives and friends at home and we are happy. May be we have a slight fear of father as he may be unhappy if we do something he doesn’t like and he may scold us. But otherwise home is called a home because it is a place of bonding and bonded by happiness. It is love. We know that everything that happens around us build happiness in the mind. Home also shapes our character and our behaviour.

Whatever happens at home is engraved in our mind as we copy it subconsciously. If the environment at home is not good, you would not be imbibing good values from there. The behaviour of your father and mother, how they talk and how they treat each other, how your relatives behave with each other, how they express their emotions, anger and happiness; how they smile, the language they use, their facial expressions; all these are easily picked up by a child. If a child is not using good language while interacting with others outside the home, if he does not behave well, he or she steals, is selfish, fighting for things, taking away other’s toys and so on, where do you think the child learned all these?
Certainly, such behaviour has less binding on his birth but more on the home environment where the people close to him behaved and showed him the way. This should be well borne by every parent that ‘Use good seeds and those seeds will grow to a big, healthy tree before your eyes’.

What is the difference between a school and a home? The moment we go to school, something happens there. We are very happy until the first bell rings. The moment that happens, we have to go inside the classroom and sit on a bench. And we wait for the teacher to come. In those days, the way teacher comes to the class itself was often a problem. The teacher would come with a cane and some books. What catches the student’s eye first is the stick that’s brought by the teacher.

So what is the connection between our mind and the cane? We know that if we are not going to follow what the teacher says, there is going to be a punishment. Why is that warning necessary? The very sight of the cane pulls the mind down. You may think that the cane is the reason why we behaved well in school. Maybe and may not be. But I still believe there is no need for a cane in a classroom. If a cane is required for punishment it can come later. But I don’t think we really need a cane. And if I need to be caned, what I learned at home does not fit well in a public place or in a group.

When the teacher enters a class, there are going to be lessons to be learnt. But why doesn’t learning give me happiness? Every learning is new knowledge. And every knowledge should be a new feel. If my mind is not feeling what I learnt, then it is definitely going to be boring, it is definitely not going to give me any excitement. If learning is an excitement, a new knowledge, a new feeling, then I would have been so happy to enjoy that feeling.

If at home every day mom makes dosa, and another day she makes idli, and yet another day she makes puttu, I am so happy because I have a new excitement, a new taste of my palate. So is education and learning. Learning gives me a new feel of the mind. Learning happens to me mostly through two of my senses. Through my eyes or through my ears; either I will learn through hearing or I will learn through seeing. So, anything connected to the feel of my mind, happens through my ears or through my eyes. And whatever happens through my eyes in the modern language is spatial ability, the ability to picturise, have a feel through a picture. And ability to listen and create a feel is called numerical skill or cognitive skill.

If a teacher comes to the class, teaches something that don’t give me a feel either through my ears or eyes, then that teaching is simply by hearting. It is knowledge that I don’t know what feel it creates, a knowledge I don’t know why I should know it. Don’t you think this is the first reason of unhappiness? It is boring and then we are just being there in the class. Or in between the classes we do a lot of funny things, with friends, hanging umbrellas on others’ collars, or throwing papers at each other. Why do we do that? It is because whatever happens in the front of the class gives you the feel of excitement. Isn’t it true?

It is the way the teacher imparts knowledge, which has no excitement or feeling, which has no motivation of a new feeling, is the cause of our first misery in the classroom. And the moment we are excited we will go in search of it. In the educational language it is called formative assessment feedback system. What is that? If the teacher knows that I got a feel, the teacher comes and asks me a few questions. That I feel, ‘Okay teacher’, how good that can be? Okay how does that happen? I start searching for it. Then the teacher asks me to go to the nature outside the classroom. Maybe it is a botany class.

You have seen the beauty of a flower; the teacher can show me the flower. The teacher can ask, “How this flower is born? Early morning, who makes it wake up?” And have you ever asked a child, how the fragrance comes? How honey comes? Who makes it? Why the plant has made it? From where it made it? A million surprises to me. Now, I don’t need even a teacher. Because the teacher is born inside my mind, as my inquisitiveness to learn. I don’t need anybody now. I will run, I will search, until I find answers. I will come back to my teacher with a feedback. “Teacher I find this, but still I have a problem.” The teacher gives me another challenge.

So what is teaching and what is happiness? It is an excitement and exploring by a child. It is nothing but exciting the mind with the new feel of knowledge and then taking the child to nature and showing him/her what happens in nature and telling the child why this has happened. And ask me ‘Can you go and find out and then come back with feedbacks?

If classrooms miss formative systems and feedbacks, and teachers fail to ignite young minds and bring feelings to the mind of excitement, then children would start feeling ‘I am bored, I am unhappy. I will continue to be unhappy’, This is the starting point. There are a million things that happen in a classroom that add no new knowledge to me, that don’t ignite my mind, that don’t excite me more, that don’t allow me to dive down into the depths of my mind, and that don’t make me more excited and happy in a classroom. It is only the beginning of my unhappiness. As I continue the story I will discuss how schools and classrooms became my problem and why I hesitated to go to a school.