If Isaac Newton’s mother had had her way, he’d have been
a farmer, and we would have wondered why on Earth we had our feet on terra-firma;
if Galileo’s father had had his way, he’d have been a doctor and we may not
have known about swinging times; and Zubin Mehta may have been a doctor,
keeping in tune with the Parsi desires of the progeny becoming a doctor/lawyer/accountant!
And probably, Einstein wouldn’t have been who he was had he not been home
schooled.
A few weeks back I had a conversation with my brother.
Upon asking how his daughters were doing, he gave me a list of things which
kept them “very busy” – swimming, chess, abacus, piano…I forget the rest on the
list. And it’s not just him; I have many friends/cousins who give me lists as
long, if not longer and give themselves the title of ‘soccer-mom’. No, it’s not
she who’s rolling along like a ball; it’s the way the children are being kicked
around! As I thought of it I wondered why parents are so ambitious for their
children, to the extent that they don’t mind them spending the majority of
their waking hours in contrived, artificial situations, always learning what
others teach and doing as they say. Even play time is fixed by a prior
appointment and very appropriately called ‘play date’! Whatever happened to the
spontaneity and creativity of playtime? And the abacus doesn’t teach your child
mathematics; it makes your child a calculator!
If Newton hadn’t been sitting idle and Galileo hadn’t
been day-dreaming, staring at the chandelier in his library, we may not have
had the most important theories in Mathematics and Physics. And if Sachin
Tendulkar hadn’t been allowed to play with the bat, we wouldn’t have had the ‘God
of Cricket’ today.
Children may soon turn around and tell their parents what
Pink Floyd’s song told the teachers.
An idle mind isn’t always the Devil’s workshop….
1 comment:
exactly...
thats how i go about with my students...
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