Runa has gone to Kolkata for a few days. It isn’t a jolly good time to be there, but I wait for the arrival of the goodies – the list of which I slipped in her bag 🙂

The last blog entry has initiated an interesting round of comments and mails. The one thing I’d like to point out is that I wasn’t the one discussing about “alternative education” or even “home schooling” (come to think of it, I don’t really know anything about how popular home schooling is in India). That stuff was written by Pradeepto and I guess he’s being shy not to follow it up with the discussions he’s been having.

I am a bit more worried about the “rewards-for-results” process that parents seem to follow. I have enough first hand anecdotes from various bookstores, retail stores and what-not to take a guess that the process seems to be adopted since it is easy to implement.

The problem as I see it lies in putting rewards (or “carrots”) in order to “make” the children do tasks and then also providing details of punishments (or “stick”) if the consequences are not according to expectations. Doing it this way makes it easy since the kids do have a lot of interesting things on their wishlist and tying the wishlist to real-life and real-time performance is supposed to get things done faster. It also puts in the incremental fear about “consequences” if things are not_done. Children are not supposed to be “made to learn”. The motivation from learning should be coming from within ie intrinsic and the environment should be such that the intrinsic motivation is fostered and nurtured.

The over emphasis on individual excellence over peer level collaboration that the current education system puts in place does create a paradox. Students go through life striving to be excellent “individual contributors” and then when they end up at a job (including research assignments) they are expected to learn to collaborate. How’s that for fun ? The other side effect of the “rat race” is the lack of focus on skills that children should learn to inculcate – managing their time, their assignments and most importantly taking time to play. The urban sprawl that the country is turning into is ensuring that the housing socities have a tiny patch of green called the children’s park. And the ones between 10-15 years either just laze around at the house watching TV or are compelled to attend an innumerable and wild variety of activity classes like tennis, karate, cricket etc.

There has to be something called multiple process disorder which creates the conflicts in the mind of a child as to what really needs to be done. The other problem of course is the overt studies (including this arm-chair one) which try and figure out what is wrong by boxing things into convenient and “pragmatic” (?) action items.