Sun, 22 Dec, 2024

Schools Are Bad for Children

By Dipesh Poudel

There are three principles on which human life flourishes and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most of the teachers have to labor and which most of the students have to endure. The first principle is that human beings are naturally different and diverse. Each one is different than another in one way or the other. Each person has different interest and ways of understanding the world. Our education system contradicts this principle by providing a very narrow curriculum where they can learn from. It limits their domain to explore. Kids prosper best when a broad curriculum that celebrates the variety of talents they have in them is provided, not when they’re exposed to tapered curriculum. Our education system focuses on standard disciplineslike science and math. They are necessary but not sufficient. For development of a child as a good human being he/she needs to learn about arts, humanities and physical education. Most of our schools only focus on the standard discipline, and make them good at maths and science, but bad at being a good person. The second principle is curiosity. If a person is curious about anything that person can learn about that thing without much assistance. Children are naturally curious, but our education kills the curiosity along with the interest to learn. Our education system does not encourage students to learn from their mistakes. The mistakes are taken as sins. Most of our chapters start by mentioning how much that chapter is important for exams. We learn about first aid to get marks in exam not to use it when necessary. The dominant culture of our education is the standardized test. A student’s marks should not be used as something to judge his/her creativity and intelligence. It is not that the standardized tests are unnecessary, they are really important. If a person goes to a medical personnel, he would like to know about  his/her blood pressure in some standardized  scale so that it will be helpful to make him/her better. Tests in education should also be similar; they should not be the factor to judge people. The third principle is that human life is inherently creative. We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. It’s the common currency of being a human being. It’s why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. The point is that education is not a mechanical system. It’s a human system. It’s about people. But our schools act like a machine that produces parrots who are only taught few things. School teaches a person to live without paying any attention to things going around him/her. In school, children rarely get a chance to learn from each other because in our education system only one person speaks in class that is a teacher and he/she is always right.