I recently read the article “School is bad for children” by John Halt. In the article he discusses the hazards of sending a child to a school and why one should discontinue this form of education. Being a student myself I agreed with most of the points including some crucial ones which pointed that a school meant for enhancing knowledge actually destroys a child’s creativity and reasoning power.
To this day in the east we have more traditional patterns of learning where they still regard books and teachers as the sole source of education hence forcing them not to believe in their own intelligence but on somebody else’s knowledge. As kids we enter schools with so much zeal and energy to learn new things and meet new people. But all of these anticipation is shattered when they tell us what we have learnt to date is worthless.
School becomes an even more undesirable place to be due to the forced rules, compulsion of attendance and teacher’s ever swinging mood. All of these resulting in loss of freedom which we as kids had before enrolling in a school. The thousands of never ending rules that a school enforces on kids are a million pound worth of burden which they have to carry till their backs ache with pain of suppression.
Moreover, the continuous pressure from parents to excel in academics and succeed the son of the next door neighbour in the class ranking all for the sake of false prejudice. Little do parents realize that the pressure they are mounting on their children are beyond the child’s best of abilities except for some very brilliant kids who can mug the book in a day’s time.
And then there are the teachers with their biasness and mood swings. To be a good student rather than learning what we are suppose to, we have to first learn the different traits to impress the specific teacher. Some teachers like it when we repeat the exact same words from the book while others will say “answer it in your own words, be more analytical.” One has to be careful so as not to end up in the black book of the teachers for they sure are experts in avenging those students.
I have seen many of students suffer due to this very case. Sometimes an intelligent, deserving student would be sent home with a ‘D’ just because he/she chose not to bring tea to the teacher’s table. Not to forget the piles of assignments that a student is assigned never to be checked.
But still one cannot criticize it completely because not everything goes wrong in a school. With the passage of time many countries and schools are changing their system to more interactive and student friendly. Allowing them to do what they want but at the same time giving them guide lines is what a new form of education is all about. Gone are the days when a student would listen to a teacher just because of the fear of being spanked, we have moved forward with time to demand change and when everything else is in the path why should our education system still be the same.
To this day in the east we have more traditional patterns of learning where they still regard books and teachers as the sole source of education hence forcing them not to believe in their own intelligence but on somebody else’s knowledge. As kids we enter schools with so much zeal and energy to learn new things and meet new people. But all of these anticipation is shattered when they tell us what we have learnt to date is worthless.
School becomes an even more undesirable place to be due to the forced rules, compulsion of attendance and teacher’s ever swinging mood. All of these resulting in loss of freedom which we as kids had before enrolling in a school. The thousands of never ending rules that a school enforces on kids are a million pound worth of burden which they have to carry till their backs ache with pain of suppression.
Moreover, the continuous pressure from parents to excel in academics and succeed the son of the next door neighbour in the class ranking all for the sake of false prejudice. Little do parents realize that the pressure they are mounting on their children are beyond the child’s best of abilities except for some very brilliant kids who can mug the book in a day’s time.
And then there are the teachers with their biasness and mood swings. To be a good student rather than learning what we are suppose to, we have to first learn the different traits to impress the specific teacher. Some teachers like it when we repeat the exact same words from the book while others will say “answer it in your own words, be more analytical.” One has to be careful so as not to end up in the black book of the teachers for they sure are experts in avenging those students.
I have seen many of students suffer due to this very case. Sometimes an intelligent, deserving student would be sent home with a ‘D’ just because he/she chose not to bring tea to the teacher’s table. Not to forget the piles of assignments that a student is assigned never to be checked.
But still one cannot criticize it completely because not everything goes wrong in a school. With the passage of time many countries and schools are changing their system to more interactive and student friendly. Allowing them to do what they want but at the same time giving them guide lines is what a new form of education is all about. Gone are the days when a student would listen to a teacher just because of the fear of being spanked, we have moved forward with time to demand change and when everything else is in the path why should our education system still be the same.
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