As a parent of two children, a seven and thirteen-year-old, I am in a unique position to understand the gaps in their education, and where the system has failed them.
As exams approach, my seven-year-old comes home dejected and exhausted. The heat drains her energy and spirit, the revisions happening in school don’t help. She is struggling with her multiplication tables. Inspite of writing them innumerable times, the answers are not quite at the tip of her tongue. She knows she’s learnt how to spell the word ‘thousand’ or ‘forty’ but she still makes mistakes because it’s difficult to think under pressure…and as a seven-year-old, she is feeling the pressure to perform for a group of grownups who think all these numbers and spellings and what-not are really important for her. All she really wants to do is eat watermelon and oranges and play with her dog and friends and hopefully get in a bit of water time. But as per instructions from her mother, she has to practice her times table and her spelling and her Konkani writing and the names of the planets and reading and division and fractions.
My thirteen-year-old wants to read books to help her escape her reality which is actually getting very complicated. Apparently, having a group of close friends is more complicated than it previously was… the group keeps splitting into friends and foes, liars and truth seekers. Everyone talks about ‘crushing’ on someone else…will I also start ‘crushing’ sometime? Wonder what the fuss is all about. And apparently her body has also decided it will branch out in different directions…paths previously unexplored. If she had a choice, she would choose to spend her day swimming in a lake, catching and observing life under water and roasting marshmallows and nuts on a fire.
But as per pressure from her mother, she has to prepare for her future. Become more independent, give her daily routine structure, do chores in the house, help with the dogs, settle her room and be nice to her sister. And she also has to study a lot to keep up with the growing pressure of the academics.
I oppose the commencement of the upcoming academic year in April. While I support the school fully in having affordable summer activities on the school campus, I am opposed to the change in the Academic year commencement. If the education department or any other person or persons have a different opinion, I am willing to discuss this at length and understand the value over the course of the coming year. But I will not accept these ad-hoc changes anymore. I want to see the research, understand the thought process and have a discussion on the pros and cons of the change before I agree to the change. My children are not yours to pull and push in whatever direction you choose. I will defend my children’s right to an effective and enriching education.
The NEP has lofty goals, most of which seem to be aligned to what I want for my child’s education. But how it is implemented in schools should be a discussion between parents and the teachers.
Excerpt from the NEP 2020…
“The teacher must be at the centre of the fundamental reforms in the education system. The new education policy must help re-establish teachers, at all levels, as the most respected and essential members of our society, because they truly shape our next generation of citizens. It must do everything to empower teachers and help them to do their job as effectively as possible. The new education policy must help recruit the very best and brightest to enter the teaching profession at all levels, by ensuring livelihood, respect, dignity, and autonomy, while also instilling in the system basic methods of quality control and accountability.”
The Department of Education, NCERT, SCERT provide the tools, expertise, research, training and accountability, but at the end of the day on ground level, the schools need to be empowered to work with the parents of all school going kids to find the right way to bring NEP to our children. The School and Staff need to have autonomy to make decisions like ‘what are the local languages that are relevant to the community that comes to this particular school’. The Teachers need to feel in control of the portion and syllabus they have been asked to teach. Giving them textbooks that cannot be effectively completed in time allocated for that subject means giving the teacher tools that are too big for the task at hand. Textbooks in Science, Math, Geography and History have to be easily attainable goals for the teachers with room for them to add their own magic, creativity, research and engagement.
Language studies should be fluid and led by teacher and parent interaction, wherein teachers can tap into other available literature outside the prescribed textbooks, so also where they can tap into music, art, theatre, dialogue, jokes and laughter to get children to enjoy using the language with their class mates.
The decision of what makes a language a local language, mother tongue, home language, spoken language needs to be firmly rooted where it belongs…with the people, the parents, the children, the teachers and the village around them who are speaking and using the languages.
Goa’s heritage and history cannot be denied, even if it is only for certain segments of society. Our children have a right to study the language that was spoken by their parents and grandparents. They have a right to study the language that is part of our “legal system” and they have the right to learn how to read the language used in archival property documents and birth and death records of their ancestors. If they live in a village that speaks what some call a ‘foreign language’ but for them it’s quite ‘local’.
They see and hear it all around them, menus and sign boards are in the supposed ‘foreign language’. They should have the opportunity, the autonomy to talk to the school and see if they can get a good education in this ‘foreign language’ that is actually pretty ‘local’ to them.