KAILASNATH
Teacher, Govt. Girls H S S, Nedumangad
What are my thoughts on ‘education’ on the eve of yet another Teacher’s day? Here I am, a teacher, teaching in Government schools for the last 22 years. Looking back at these long years of teaching experience, I am not in any way happy about all that I’ve so far experienced.
During the years when I was a schoolboy, the classroom was dominated by the presence of an authoritarian teacher wielding his chalk, talk and stick upon young inquisitive minds. The teacher had no regard for what the children were intrinsically and the much touted phrase “child centered education was not in vogue. But now there is a lot of talk and lip service about child centered education, autonomous learning, life long learning, learning to learn, learning to do, live together, learning to be etc. etc. But basically have our classrooms changed? And is there child-centered education in its true sense? I am afraid I have to give an answer in the negative.
Our classrooms are still as they were 50 years back. Still the teacher talks to his class and writes on the black board with chalk and all teaching and learning seems to end there. Still the child anxiously mugs up his textbooks and goes to the exam hall sitting there in grave silence for 2 hours putting down his ‘answers’ to paper.
Where have we gone wrong? Who is to blame? Bureaucracy, hierarchy, or our basic human frailty?I am groping in darkness.
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Iam a teacher and a father.My son speaks,reads and writes English satisfactorily,but he hates his textbook.Where we are mistaken?