The nucleus of our
thinking system is deeply soiled with a narrower perspective that ‘school’ is the only habitat
for learning to take place. Other than those who possess a utilitarian
educational background, we seem to disremember that learning can happen
anywhere, anytime with anyone. In fact, learning transpires in every moment of
our lifecycle.
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| There is no full-stop for learning |
As an educator, it
is worrisome that today’s youth are hardly found to be buried under books –
let alone with the prescribed textbooks. They share a broken relationship with
books of any sort while some have literally divorced – because what they
are asked to read and learn is just a piecemeal work.
Gone are the days
when education was considered a means to earn a livelihood. Children surviving
with such blood of thoughts are so rare today – even rarer than those
vulnerable species of any flora or fauna. So I classify them as the ‘endangered species’
of learners.
And now with snowballing disturbances due to technological dominance, scarce
parental attention and dysfunctional homes due to a divorced or broken family, that
limited species available in the schools are threatened to suffer a mass extinction
at an alarming rate. When such enabling conditions are deprived, children consider
learning as worst as paying a survival tax.
In this span of my
9 years of teaching, I have observed each day into this profession becoming rather
increasingly testing. I have served in almost any kind of school setting –
rural, semi-urban, or urban. And of all, urban is the worst experience thus far.
While it is
disputable that schools in rural and urban areas are dependent on their own set
of parameters to define their quality, and that neither of them is comparable for
being better nor worse, teaching in urban is certainly both physically and psychologically
draining.
In urban schools, the
learning environment is plagued with discipline deficiency and toxically contaminated
with intense nebulous behavioural problems. Due to a scanty and delicate
parental involvement, academic drought in
the children is clearly visible. The worst thing of all is becoming an ‘educational
nanny’ for some students who come from a ‘dysfunctional
home’ caused by a broken family or for students
whose parents don’t even care about their kid’s education. Teaching those leftover students are as
challenging as dragging a goat to drink water from the river.
Under such
circumstances, I yearn for the years working in rural schools with those students
having lesser juvenile delinquency and cohesive parents who share the dividend of
educating their child despite being busy making their ends meet. The
parents of the rural villages either acts as a catalyst or become an
environment itself for their children’s learning. They design a separate time
from their packed schedule to track the progress of their child because they
assume that educating their child is a shared responsibility of a teacher and
parents.
Such thoughts are
miles away and furthest from the minds of some parents who send their kids to urban schools. While they are into a marathon of lucrative ventures, they never
realize that the academic bank of their child gets bankrupted. When the lesser
value of education is cultivated in the minds of those academically unfortunate
kids (though financially dominant), they fail to compass between good and bad
or divine and evil. Consequently, they become an ambassador of juvenile delinquencies,
professionally trained lawbreakers and bizarre pests to the otherwise serene
and clean school biodiversity.
One as a parent never
understand this and by the time we diagnose, it is too late to regain the health of a child’s
education.
At such a terminal stage, even rehabilitation under a series of tuition classes can’t straighten
the backbone of a child’s progress.
So, when those
parents having 1 or 2 children can’t spread their hands of care and upbringing,
what is the question of asking teachers that need to stretch every inch of their
skin to touch those hundreds and thousands? In fact, such things don’t need any
subtitle to understand and are never classically abstract.
But as an educator,
it is painful to see children’s future getting diseased even with the needy
drugs available at their disposal.
“The beautiful
thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you” – B.B. King
