It is the last day of the weekend and I wake up to a
beautiful Sunday morning looking forward to a lovely day. I pick up my
newspaper with excitement and the headlines are shocking. An attack in a neighboring country and very young lives lost in another heinous act of terrorism. I move on with my newspaper and I only read news filled with crime
and despair. You quietly start mourning for all the tragedy and the day has
turned sombre.
On reflecting, I wonder that as a teacher we have to
transact the curriculum efficiently but we have a bigger silent role to play
and that of inculcating right values in our students. Every lesson of ours is
well thought off and linked to day to day activities to guide students on the
right path of life. In fact a good school stands apart from a regular school
because of the school's dedication to link academics to life skills.
So the question most pertinent after observing the
current violent scenarios all round the world is 'where did we teachers fail? What did we miss? Did
we see all this coming and choose to ignore it? Were we helpless? Were we too caught up with syllabus
completion to stress on values? Were the parents ignorant to our pleas to work
with their child? Was our value building system considered obsolete by these
people?
If we truly desire to change the future we need to
truly introspect the school education system deeply. We need to invest in
training our teachers and making them sensitive, we need to empower them,
we need to redesign our syllabus and assessment patterns, we need to have
stronger parent teacher bonding. We
need to make school education holistic with equal stress on curricular and co curricular
activities. The government all over the world need to spend a huge amount of
the GDP on education and making it mandatory for all students to enroll.
Attendance should be mandatory or parents get penalized. Only with firm decisions enforced, will we rise to a brighter future.
A child's personality and his future choices are a product of many factors.Family,education,peer influence,life experiences,religous edn,mental make up,etc.Education does contribute but other factors can be overpowering as well.I still remember having read about an incident in US where a teacher's son went on to shoot innocent pupils in a school.As a teacher did she fail to inculcate right values in her own home?
ReplyDeleteThe British education system in state schools is quite examplary.They focus on British values,create lessons on every minor issue observed through PSHE.But still crime exists.Yes as educators we should introspect and do our best.Each teacher can make a difference to how a child moulds through one year they groom under her/his influence. But still it should be a societal effort to eliminate vices prevalent around us.