The Gaps to Bridge

Learning is a byproduct of numerous educational pursuits, both individual and collective. The individual learning agenda relies heavily on acquiring the best-fit social skills for a variety of needs. A child’s immediate surroundings within the bounds of a home build some equations to help the kid acquire a certain set of norms to accord with. The kid’s readiness to fall in for a prototype of such behavioral dictatorship is considered laudable but the resistance to the same demand sounds all the more like a mutiny to be crushed or an evil to be nipped.     

Behavioral Make-up

To a grown-up’s daunting eyes, a child’s littleness may seem a good enough prospect to browbeat the weakling into a particular mould of behavioral make-up. This cut-to-the-bone generality of adult world is a common denominator in the field of parenting. It sounds pretty obvious that our role in parenting warrants an absolute control over the child we have helped into existence. Notwithstanding the fact that like all of us, a child comes into this world hard-wired with a set of capabilities, parents deem it just fine to ignore all such manifests as long as they do not seem misaligned with the familial code of conduct or ease of existence. The core interplay of biological make-up with the commanding adherence to social appropriation is a subject of deep inquiry. There is a long list of ‘could haves’ and ‘would haves’ in this regard. A child’s incessant urge to draw doodles on walls, for example, could have been a sign of a would-be artist in the years to come, but it did not seem just as appropriate to a clean-freak parent and thus that first sign of natural talent squashed for the sake of clean walls. Similarly, a child’s fascination with gadgetry and the resultant proclivity for a tactile sneak-peak into the very framework of a thing in hand can pose a potential threat to a finance-weary dad, who knows he cannot afford another toy of this kind anytime soon.

The Random Find and the Show Time

Well, at times, even in the face of these parental, or in more general terms, the social set of trammels, a child’s puissant consistency with his inherent gifts wriggles out and finds some acclaim. Whereas, earlier on, a child’s staunch adherence to whims was considered beyond pale, a new enthusiasm for the new-found talent fills up the same parents with a kind of pride that must be known public. This overweening ambition for public acknowledgement brings the innocent soul into a new kind of trial having to stage the same task such as singing, or dancing, or arithmetic, or rhymes etc in familiar and unfamiliar situations alike.

“Hey kiddy, show your aunt the crazy dance moves you did on the party the other day. Come on! Do it, dear!” chimes a mom’s voice over a buzz of gossips during a tea-time gathering.

Or

“Attention, please! Unlike his father, my son’s arithmetic skills betray a deep fascination with adroit calculations. Come sonny. Show my friends how nimble you are with the rules of divisibility,” jangles a dad’s sonorous voice amid a tinkle of cutlery over dinner.

Quirky Shift in Attention

This chanced ownership of children by parents for certain discreet skills does precipitate a sudden shift in their attention, which otherwise remained suspended so far. Likewise, this twist does not go unnoticed by the little soul, whose next adaptability maneuver will certainly be even more demanding because he or she would not budge from bartering his scanty show times for parents’ anxious eyes. However, like all childhood idiosyncrasies, certain weariness sneaks in against this repetitive demand for puppetry on the part of parents, and they lose their child’s hard-won epiphany in the learning process. Parent’s own retreat to their usual drudge and plaintiveness returns just as quickly.

The Treasure Lost

This parental quirkiness continues haunting the children inside their classrooms as well, where, by contrast, this two-bodied parental control is replaced by another legion of a few adult aliens, who weigh them down with their own set of expectations across a range of subjects and disciplines.  Now, this little soul is en route to better acquisition of learning, supposedly, under the care of these deities of wisdom. 

Rarely do parents realize that in giving away their child into a schooling system, they have doubled their responsibility to share shoulders with teachers for a joint venture in a long term educational process. On the contrary, their much needed care and cooperation dramatically subsides partly because of their unrelenting consciousness that school now bears the onus for their child’s upbringing, and partly on grounds of a smart pretext that their long job hours, both professional and domestic, and the resultant exhaustion leave them little margin to chip in for cooperation.

The Washback Effect

This excuse on the part of parents generates a wash back effect that has a direct bearing on the schools. On the other hand, the over imposition of the sanctity of discipline within the hallowed walls of a classroom institutes another restriction to a child’s free and inquisitive participation in the creative learning process. This split in adult attitudes leaves the child completely baffled. This gap asks him or her for a duality of adaptation to two contrasting modes of behaviours in school and later at home. This is exactly where parents and teachers should chip in, hand in hand, to help the child come to terms with this challenge of conformity. However, this consistent need for collaboration between teachers and parents wears out over time, sooner or later, for the same excuses stated above. As a result there are occasional stand-offs between the two essential agents of child education i.e. parents and teachers, and this incongruity features nowhere else as blatantly as it does during formal parent-teacher meet-ups at schools.  

The Crisis Sneaks In

Once this pact of mutual cooperation between the stake holders is breached, the only dividend that hangs in balance is that of the child’s education. This vacuum stays unaddressed and is ultimately stuffed up with the most disorientating things such as ennui, indifference, platitudes, neglects etc. This persistent disinterest on the part of adult parties in equation soon funnels down to child’s perceptive mind, which registers this stuff with more subtlety than that of the needle on the Richter Scale. Once all the elements in this triangle disorientate to different priority settings, the child’s learning paradigm shrinks down to the bare minimum level. What’s worse is that this state of affairs gets even more cumbersome unless the stakeholders in question revamp their interests for a collective gain, i.e. child’s profit in education.

The Widening Gap

Sadly, in the absence of any pertinent action taken in this regard, the gap widens over time and a repelling sense of drudgery sneaks in and plunges its roots deep into the long term educational process. What follows is the exact opposite of ‘education’ in its true sense and spirit.  This might sound like a sweeping conclusion, but it does have the substance that can twitch the dormant thought neurons of those who think they are concerned. With my current experience in teaching English to grade five students at a school that sits in the heart of an industrial set-up, I feel painfully reawakened to a host of issues that have ruthlessly evolved unaddressed with these kids.

Badly Modeled Educational System

Sir Kenneth Robinson, a British author, speaker and international advisor on education, believes that “our education system is modeled on the interests of industrialization and in the image of it. Likewise our schools are organized on factory settings.” This production line imagery, which pertinently holds true for all schooling ‘systems’ in Pakistan, does seem to claim an overbearing relevance to schools already situated in the laps of industries. Such schools draw heavily upon this mechanical and profitable side of industrial agenda and fail to resist its interplay with the dispensation of education. Thus the impetus for maximum yield on production-line sounds fitting enough to form the school manifesto for producing maximum marks on children’s progress cards, batch after batch.

Marks Mania

This manifesto is readily subscribed by the parents, who in this context are none other than those who partner this production-line mindset and believe entitled to this heap of marks from the school end as well. So, the admission time agreement sounds all the more like this: “Since I am busy day and night helping the industry produce the maximum bags of sugar on the conveyer-belt, I hereby entrust you with this child of mine to help me get served in the same coin.” That looks like a fair bargain, and after a few file-work formalities, here comes the child admitted, whichever grade he or she may be. The yearly result-day pomp and show bears witness to this agreed agenda among the stakeholders, whereof loads and loads of scores and grades are siphoned from stage onto the result cards. What a happy-go-lucky end for an academic year ̶ children scuttling around joyfully and parents oozing pride.

Compromised Teaching

Well, coming back to my concerns with grade five teaching, I must admit that this experience has brought me the ever-evasive answer to the persistent cognitive impairment found in the senior classes. Our grade-specific teacherly expectations from the scholars in senior classes bide on this presumption that their educational achievement has evolved seamlessly, so all we have to do is grab the relay baton and run the next leg of the journey. So this sweeping sense of carrying the momentum of a relay race towards the finish line has ripped the education off its core and essence, i.e. refinement of mind and deductive reasoning. Students’ inability to showcase any divergent thinking in senior groups stands just as equally absent in the junior classes, at least in a grade as junior as five. But in a system that trades with marks, such capabilities, if at all present, are overlooked as unnecessary cogs for the smooth running of the machine.

What proves you wrong with all such expectations is the fact that almost all students make it to grade five with their score cards laden with marks, a sufficient proof of their all-round development. Quite in line with this run-of-the-mill progression of educational conveyer belt, when I processed these high achievers through the ‘Inspection Unit’, I mean the test series, after the completion of a certain chunk of syllabus, the results shrank down to below 10 percent even for those who had scored above 85 or 90 percent in the same subject in the previous class, with the exception of a minority of 5 to 6 students in a section of 30.

Conclusion

This dissociative approach to students’ untapped potential has left gaping holes in their personal development, squarely alike in educational units operating under different names and with different curricula but in the same industrial setting. These gaps loom large on our general educational environment across the country as well, and seem to continue clouding the educational habitat, unless measures are taken to break free from this marks craziness and strategies adopted to stop compromising the child’s cognitive built-up against this standardization of elephants and turtles alike.