A t long last, vaulting over an intense concentration on the material world and attempts to pass on an understanding of it to children in watertight blocks of knowledge (mathematics, history, biology, physics and so on) is a deep concern about their emotional condition as they return to their classrooms.
In previous years, lip service was paid to emotional quotient and life skills, but now everyone knows for sure that without these inner resources, all education is doomed to produce a generation of people who understand themselves and the forces acting upon their environment even less than their parents or grandparents did in their time.
In India, children are lucky to be attending school at all, given that unlettered millions join the workforce every year as child labourers.
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The universal fact that children below the age of 12 have forgotten most of what they absorbed in face-to-face teaching-learning situations before early 2020 is hardly worth mentioning, seeing that it has been discussed every day and on different platforms for so long. We know that it is the chief problem facing our teachers and caretakers. But no less a crisis is the emotional state and prolonged weariness of teachers trying to connect with their wards who are (let’s face it) ahead of their educators in their deft use of tech. A youngster I met last week jovially demonstrated how his friend pretends to be struggling with a poor connection to avoid interaction in class. “Ma … áaam … I … caa … aant … he … ear … y … ooo,” he mimicks the breaking voice, all the while moving his hands and head in slow motion to fool his poor class teacher.
Therefore, Teachers’ Day is a good day to think more deeply than before about what both children and their teachers have to face together as emotional beings engaged in what can only be called an educational arms race.
The post-1990s generation in particular has endured “shadow” education — classes outside school hours that permit no rest for either body or mind. Over the past decade or so, as teenage suicides and violence by children began to rise, a question has repeated itself: on the road called academic excellence, did we, somewhere, sometime, take a wrong turn?
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Our school-goers are in a system that concentrates on developing only their mental faculties and pays little attention to their imaginative, creative sides. That inner space which needs emotional training, where feelings rise and are handled (or not), is a vacant plot waiting to be filled by anarchic forces and ideas based on ignorance and prejudice.
Challenging backdrops
The wider backdrop of our hopes for the next generation in the country has to contend with the five problematic intersections of caste, class, gender, language and religious differences. The immediate backdrop is a ferocious run-up to a set of examinations that marks a child as bright or dull, smart or slow.
To this, add the breakdown of the safety network of joint families and neighbourhood affinities, the rise of a gross phantom world created by an entertainment industry which glamorises violence and we get what educationist Krishna Kumar called a training ground for war.
It is true that we cannot reverse history or social and global economic trends, but we must have a counter-strategy that builds a humanistic perspective. We need to train teachers in counselling and mentoring children to be ethical and empathetic persons and not just wage earners.
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