How Well Are We Nurturing Our Children

About 48 hours ago I was handling a session for some young people who had just enrolled into an MBA and the ones who have entered the next year of their MBA as well. I spoke on the topic You Are In It Now…What Next…!

I was successful in

· urging the students to consistently develop their skills by observing, analyzing, understanding and learning new things.

· urging them to develop a strong character, is crucial, to resist the temptations of money and power that will prevent young people from reaching new heights and also reaching their potential.

· urging them to follow ethics and values which will give you immense satisfaction than even earning billions."

I believe only education that can nourish inbuilt virtues can impart true intelligence.

Today, the concern of every parent is that their children should grow up to be well educated human beings, with certain values in their lives, and eventually they should be happy. Reasonable aspiration and fair enough to think that way, but, somewhere along the line, the link to happiness appears to be getting squashed and severed. Perhaps we are losing to reach the goal of happiness.

Look at a baby, then a child, what a beautiful smile they have whatever region, religion, colour, caste or creed they belong to. What joy and friendliness it exudes. But see the face of the same child by the time it gets to middle school after the primary and the to the high school from the middle, and then on to colleges and higher education. Do you see the same joy retained on the face of this kid as it was endowed as an infant, or a growing up?

The answer most certainly is "No."

This is what we need to examine, and think; is there anyway that the innocence of the individual can be retained despite growing up, despite maturing?

If this can be achieved, then we'd have attained something really marvelous, because innocence brings with it an inexplicable beauty.

Even an ignorant person can be innocent, but such innocence does not have much value. An intelligent person can be devious and crooked, then does intelligence have much value. What is really worth having on this planet is an intelligence that compliments innocence, an intelligence that doesn't destroy innocence.

Can this value system be inculcated early in the child's learning so that every child learns to be loving and friendly?

In schools and colleges, if you ask the children how many friends they have and they will count them on fingers - one, two, three, four, five... not more than that. Amazing isn't it as to how they make this choice. One question therefore comes to mind., If a child doesn't know to be loving and with the 40-50 children with whom they spend most of their academic time being present with them in the classroom, and in the play fields, how will they become friendly with the 6 billion people on this planet and the world over.

The basic habit of making friends has been lost somewhere in the pursuit of selfish education and competition. Children therefore should be encouraged by the parents and their teachers to make a new friend everyday.

Like the protons and neutrons that are in the center of each atom, while the negatively charged particles are on the circumference, similarly human consciousness, mind and life also, all the negatives are in the periphery. At the core of every living being there is this positive virtue. And if we are successful in finding the means to nourish this virtue, we will see the children growing up to youth and then to grow up to become radiant human beings endowed with great human values.

To most people the sign of true and lasting success is a smile (which nobody can take away from you , and that which you can give away liberally as you don't lose anything at all) together with friendliness, compassion and the willingness to serve each other without any expectations, then we will have a world of peace and love, because it's very painful to hear that there are shoot-outs in colleges today and there are things happening in schools (the incident in a Delhi Public school involving two students in intimate acts), that was unheard off anytime before. It is high time that we all came together to identify ways and means of restoring the respect, honour and dignity that education has commanded historically.

The need of the day is broad-minded and broad-based education accompanied by a warm heart. It is no use if you acquire good education and then you look down upon everybody else. A well-educated person is one who is friendly and compassionate who can be "nobody" without everybody.

And whether terrorism has its roots in the leftist doctrines, they are all spawned in our schools and colleges. That's where the children and the youth start reflecting what is, what is right and what is wrong; which in turn, leads to deliberation as to what they should do to put the entire world right. A multi-cultural, multi-faith open-mindedness can come from education alone. Even if a small part of this planet is left ignorant on this level, the world will
still be a safe place to be.

So all thinkers, big or small and the good minds of the society today must ponder on a holistic, healthy education that will help us retain the values which we are all naturally endowed with. Together, we must help spread the significance of human values, broadmindedness and  warmth in their hearts. That should be the only goal when we are bringing up our children.

View of the other members on this will be highly appreciated.

Warmregards,

Raman

You are indeed right. They are the Leaders of the future and what we sow will be what we reap.In terms of what is seen around us this is no cause for surprise because we have moved into a deep materialistic abyss and ingoned our inner development much to our own peril..

here are some thoughts on what happened to values in different social contexts.

Subject Matter that Matters

The conventional way of viewing the problem school subject matter goes like this: There is a huge and growing mountain of things to know. Therefore they must select what is most important to learn and what will provide the best foundation for going on and learning more. Everything beyond that is pedagogy--the art of ensuring that students master and retain what has been presented.

The idea of helping students understand their world is a generally accepted aim of
education. However, this has a different meaning depending on the part of the world
one comes from. Cultural differences exist in the purposes of education and in the
importance of values/character education. In many societies, especially Eastern
societies, the moral dimension of education is the top priority. This may be traced to
those societies’ emphases on the collective vs. the individual, “…one may even say that
the social or moral dimension is the primary aim of Chinese and Japanese education.
Cognitive knowledge is respected only when it serves the moral aim.”

This is in dramatic contrast to the pre-occupation with individual rights and freedoms
seen in the USA. Examples of this can be seen throughout Western systems of
education: Individual Education Plans (IEPs) for special needs students in the USA;
small class sizes predicated upon the notion that smaller classes mean that teachers can  give individual students more attention, and discipline as a classroom management tool  to control unwieldy students, as opposed to a trait to be cultivated for its own sake.
Increasingly, teachers in both the East and West are feeling the pressure to instill in
students large amounts of information, leaving less time for values/character education.
Bereiter (2002) notes however, that “what we call knowledge is only belief that has
gained acceptance…..there is no value-free knowledge.”

Another cultural distinction which makes values/character education seem to be less important among Western, industrialized nations is the emphasis on the external
physical world (best represented by science and abstract knowledge) as opposed to the  social world (which emphasizes the internal, moral domain).

“For example, Western culture places a great deal of importance on explicit knowledge
about the physical world, and indeed this knowledge is central to much of the
educational system…..However, at the same time, in such cultures as Japan and India,
knowledge about the social world and how one negotiates one’s way within it is valued
much more and harnesses far more energy than does knowledge about the physical
world.”

Even when values/character education is deemed important in Western school systems,
it is often mistakenly thought of as just enabling students to better understand and
function in their immediate surroundings: school, home, family, society. It is deeper
than that according to Bereiter: .The progression is not from the home out into a wider
and wider world. It starts with the whole world and the progression is to deeper levels
of understanding. It is in this respect that values/character education,
when done well, fosters both higher order cognitive skills and deeper intra-personal
and emotional intelligence.

In a landmark study of American undergraduate education, Ernest Boyer (1987) sums
up the need for values/character education:

“Education for what purpose? Competence to what end? At a time in life when values should be shaped and personal priorities sharply probed, what a tragedy it would be if the most deeply felt issues, the most haunting questions, the most creative moments were pushed to the fringes....

Approaches to Values/Character Education

Rather than values/character education being something “added to the plate” of teachers, values/character education may be the plate itself, supporting everything else.

Most psychologists, educators, and policy-makers, concur with the general public that a
universal set of values must exist, although differences are expressed as to the origin of
those values – coming either from the natural or spiritual realm. Thus, various
approaches to teaching values have been developed, depending upon the cultural view
of the aims of education, and assumptions about the source of values, as well as how
people learn.

Prof.Lakshman