When ‘Endangered Species’ are threatened…

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.   

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