I consider character building as the main and essential basis of the educational development. — Mahatma Gandhi (My Experiments with Truth)
The banking style of education puts the teacher and the learner against each other and makes learning a battle. — Paulo Freire (The Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
‘All children are perfectly designed organisms ready to learn,’ declared Voltaire. According to Rousseau, ‘A child advises itself’.
The role of a teacher in the upbringing of the child has been a broad subject in almost every school of thought in philosophy.
Yet, the bloody ending of a teacher in her own classroom at the hands of her own student exposes how far we have come from the ultimate aims of education.
As a child rights activist, working along with children for the past 25 years, writing for them, I was shell-shocked. How many of us realise that this violence is the murder of education?
The pre-adolescent child of a middle-class family today undergoes the maximum pressure. Irfan’s neighbours say they never saw him play with anyone.
The classmates say he had no friends and was a last bench boy. We don’t see children playing on the streets any more. Instead they are before a TV, videogame or undergo hours of tuition.
Irfan’s life would have been different if he had roadside friends and played unorganised games that teach him what schools or textbooks cannot.
TV serials, videogames, violent WWE fights make a child aggressive. Irfan says he learnt to kill the teacher from the latest hit Hindi film. Note: he understands Hindi films well, yet he scores less when it is a subject of learning!
Paulo Freire calls our education system a banking method in his Portuguese work ‘The Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ that I translated. The oppressor, he says, is the teacher who just fills the head with facts. In this system, the hate and anger for the subject is transformed into hatred of the teacher.
Parents are also at fault. If there had been somebody at home to hear Irfan’s pleas on the ill-treatment of the classroom, things would have been happier.
The changes coming in the education system will unburden the teacher. After unburdening the teacher, educate the parent. Save Irfans! Save teachers! John Dewey says, ‘The classroom democracy is the only solution; but it can never be achieved without child democracy in the family.’ How true!
Ayesha Natarasan, educationist/translator/writer, writes science, children literature and on education in Tamil. A teacher for 25 years, he is a recipient of Dr Radhakrishnan state award.
He works as the principal of a private HSS in Cuddalore. He can be contacted at www.eranatarasan.com.
