Need of an Ideal School

The child before going to school is much smarter, curious, less afraid of what he does not know, confident, resourceful, independent than he will ever be again in his schooling. He has solved the mystery of language, as he has discovered on his own by experimenting and developing his own models of grammar of language. However, school thinks only it can teach provide certain concepts but they fail to acknowledge that they are also learning complicated concepts by themselves.

The child is curious, patient, determined, energetic and skillful learner. When he sits down at his desk, we teach at once many things that also reinforce the concept that learning is separate or different from living telling them that they come to school to learn as if they were not learning anything before. This also means that living is outside the school and learning starts when one enters the school. Many students express their opinion after a long vacation look troubled as if their life is taken away or the time for learning has again approached as if they had forgotten in their memory. We have to inculcate the message that living and learning are not separate but they are interrelated concepts, learning can happen everywhere, living in itself is a great learning, we can learn anywhere and schools are not the mere storehouse or reservoir of knowledge.

Students in school are asked to read out in such a way that they do not know it before. They are made to think such that they learnt how to read due to school and if teachers do not ask them to read, they can’t. We take credit for ourselves for qualities they already have possessed. We should not keep them in illusion but tell that they carry potentiality of their own and they need to uncover only. Students become to think that learning is a passive process, something that is asked to do by others instead of something they do for themselves.

Such feelings develop in them and they may face inferiority complex, thinking that they are not trustworthy, fit only to take what others say, or like a blank paper for other people to write on. We grunt a lot regarding the respect for the child as an individual but what we speak a lot about is opposite of our actions that includes what they know, want, like, dislike, experience, need, fear are of no any slight importance but what counts at school is what teachers know, thinks as important, wants them to do and think. This makes child to develop habit of not asking questions as their concerns are of no value to the teachers. Slowly the child starts to hide his curiosity and later becomes ashamed of disclosing that same curiosity. They start to accept the teachers’ evaluation of them as they do not get chance to find out their person in them.

Grown in such environment, the students learn that to be uncertain, confused, wrong, and unaware is a crime. When teachers categorize answers as plainly right and wrong, they learn to fake, cheat and bluff for the perfect answer. Before he joined the school, he would work for hours, on his own, not even thinking of reward, making sense of the world and gaining competence. After joining school, he plans to avoid assigned duties and makes his teachers think that he is working when he is actually is not. He starts to not work when the teacher is not looking at him by stealing a glance from one corner of the eyes. Students learn to escape the reality and start to daydream of days before he joined school when he was very confident, contrary to what he has lost now.
The school teaches them to be indifferent. The child when joins the school has much curiosity regarding other people but in our classrooms, the students who are next to each other only a few feet away are restricted to talk with each other. They cannot interact, talk or smile with each other as they always are ordered to stay quiet and still by their school. They learn to live without paying attention to anything going around them. Most of the children take school as ugly, cold and inhumane where human sentiments have vanished.

In our schools, it seems that everyone is assigned certain roles to perform like in dramas where responses are not honestly given to students. The aura in the classroom is filled with suspicion and anxiety. We can’t even find nearly 25 percent children who come through their schooling with much left of their curiosity, independence, or sense of own dignity, competence and work.
Criticisms became more and to cope with those is a crucial task. Some approaches are tough and may take a longer time. Firstly, compulsory school attendance should be replaced with giving a large number of authorized absences annually. At the beginning it was essential so as to protect the children’s right to schooling and to remove exploitation of their labour. However schools have become the areas of exploitation to students. The school boasts that if kids did not have to go school they would all be out in the streets. If schools stayed just the way they are, children would spend at least some time there because that’s where they would be likely to find friends and it is a meeting place for them.

Secondly, we should get kids out of the school buildings that allow them chance to learn about the outside world at first hand. Some educators have realized to understand this. Taking children outside the school and exposing them to outside world like museums, exhibits, courtrooms, radio, TV stations, meetings, businesses, laboratories, and parks can help them in understanding their world and society at first hand. Moreover we should not bring full-time teachers in the schools instead real writers, poets, novelists, playwrights should be hired to talk about the problems of their craft. Paired learning should be implemented where students do their work, including their tests, together and share the marks that this work gets.

Children should be asked to judge their own work. Asking them to correct their mistakes often will discourage him from working well further. Some works are done independently by them like running, playing games, climbing, rope jumping and so on. If they are not well in doing some activities they compare their performances with those who are more skilled and slowly learn from them. We should give children a chance to detect their mistakes so that they can correct themselves. In some subjects like science and math, the child can be handed even answer books to correct his own papers. Children should learn to measure their own understanding and to know what they know and do not know. Finally abolishing of fixed curriculum helps them to make sense of the world or helps them get along in it as people remember only things that are interesting and useful to them.

Ken Subedi