“Why
is the sky blue?”…“How do airplanes fly?”…I guess that most
parents who are reading this would have had these kinds of questions
posed to them at some stage of their child’s growing up years. The
questions might seem simple but the answers to which they lead to
might not be that straightforward. The parent would have been pleased
that their child had an inquisitive mind. But do we wonder what
happened to that curious mind a few years later?. Do you agree that
the questions seem to dry up and the adolescent does not exhibit that
same hunger to learn new things unless it involves completing a last
minute school project or mugging for their final exams?
For
those eager for an explanation on this, it might be disconcerting to
know that the conventional education system implemented in schools
might be a main factor in diminishing the ‘spark’ found in the
young mind. To be more specific, it is the emphasis on studying
rather than learning on any subject matter. What is the difference,
you may ask. Without getting too technical or relying on definitions
per se, studying is when we try to get a particular knowledge by
reading, research, reflecting whereas learning can be taken as the
superset of studying with even more extensions of understanding what
was studied, applying it in a variety of situations, etc. It can be
agreed that most students are ‘studying’ these days rather than
learning.
The
students are not to be blamed fully as the environment in which they
are placed ensures this imbalance is maintained. Studying just to get
good grades which in turn ensures paper qualification and progressive
career development. Even the parents have been led to believe or
pressured to ensure their children are moulded like this. Eventually
we will hear of these students dropping out of tertiary courses
before completion or settling for a work position which is in no way
related to what they had studied for in the universities. These
malaises naturally occur when the beautiful feeling of gaining new
knowledge and grasping its full workings are sacrificed for just
“superficial knowing”. With the core issue identified, next
course should be the progress to solve and rectify this.
The
student will initially equip him or herself with knowledge acquiring
skills at home and childhood. This means that the parents have the
main role to create a conducive mindset which will be engrained
permanently. For example, the parent can explain a science phenomenon
by conducting a small experiment masked as a play session. This
serves to get the child to get that particular knowledge fully but
under the notion that the child is playing. Or when the child hits
adolescence, the parent can be a friend who motivates the child as a
friend to maybe pursue an extra curriculum activity, like sports
related, charity and event organizing, create projects which benefit
the community and to develop further from there, just to name a few.
This
write up is not to comprehensively detail the specific facts and
statistics, nor the countless ideas and ways to be applied to realise
that the world is going borderless and global and that knowledge is
the only tool to “navigate” in this world. If the world is
limitless, it would be naïve to think that all skills needed in it
can be confined to a small class. The writer would like to conclude
this piece with the below quote. Thank you.
Written by: Paramjothy Paramaselvam for Tuitionprovider.com
