By: ARSHID MALIK
When I was a child I was educated under a system that was practically designed to suit the needs and demands of the industrial revolution. This system, as stands obvious, was a by product of the industrial revolution and remains to be so. We, as school going children, were treated as raw material which was meant to be processed and thus the separate “classes” much like the “batches” in the industrial sector.
There was no appealing to the core individual who was hidden behind the veils of uniforms, packing material in other words. And things remain the same. Today’s education systems are no different than what they used to be when we kids, except for the integration of various complications into the system that keep the mind off the matter that actually matters, aesthetics that is. In our schooling systems aesthetics is a faculty that is generally done away with.
Please do not confuse aesthetics with the small time craft work and drawing projects that our children get to do back home or on the school campuses. Our schooling systems are simple mechanized workshops that intend to polish children as if they were chunks of metal. And one may ask why it is that way?
Well, we are all in for change but change is threatening as well and requires a conceptual and working knowledge of the after state, or in other words the changed state. We talk a lot about change but when it comes to performance we slither away. Same holds true about our education systems. We talk a lot about changing the system but since we do not work the basics chances are too low for a potential success rate.
We need to go back in time to understand why our education systems are the way there are right now and then we need to revamp the whole system, which is the worst we could do. What is to be done post a formal examination of the systems of education that have evolved over the centuries is that the whole system has to be disposed off, and yes I mean that. The whole system has to be cancelled and all associations with it or its linear appendages have to be mutilated and there after a period of transition needs to be preceded by “ultimate calm”. Yes we have to particularly forget about anything called “education”.
We have to send our children to farms rather than to registered educational “informal detention facilities”. We have to let them learn from scrap, from everyday life that touches us every moment and while this period of calm lasts we have to work on a modern system of education that is not tied to the whole theory and practise of the industrial revolution. We have to understand that children are not meant for batch processing as they are never uniform like a batch of apples, even though the truth is that there are very rare matches between apples while loaded as a batch.
Every child is unique just like the black and white pattern on every zebra is and every and each one of these kids needs a different set of circumstances to work in with adequate and requisite tools of operation. We should really get it off our skin that children are of young age and that way they are malleable. We also need to do away with the common and recurrent idea that children are children in the sense that they do not anything lest we teach them. The best lessons that children learn are crafted by them individually without the help of the elders. So it would be best if we could just leave them alone and let them shine according to their pertinent faculties but that is an impossibility that Plato also messed with.
We are affectionate living beings and cannot abandon our young. Well, whatever the case be we need to start looking at children from a totally new perspective that is clean of all systems of prejudices. As per the needs and requirements of a child we need them to let be not in a facility but rather a habitat where they would mix and match without any barriers of age. Young ones could pair up with elder ones and create magic together. I am talking about education, and that is an affirmative. Teachers should be willing to learn from children as much as they yearn to teach the young ones and in certain cases the probability of having a teacher around could be completely deemed absent. Utopia, you would say. Mind your language would be my reply for utopia is impossibility only as long as we do not consider it a possibility.
All have said might seem too far-fetched and I do agree to some extent but unless we dream we will not get anywhere ahead of where we are right now. We need to follow the “shock therapy” if we ever want to change how things look at present, which is murky of course. The best you can do if you do not want to be a part of the global new for change then please let you children be what they want to be while they are at it and away from decent detention facilities.
