‘Education must be oriented not towards the yesterday of a child’s development, but towards its tomorrow.’ - Lev Vygotsky

My five and half year old daughter was having her study time with me. To my surprise I found in her English script these two sentences in separate pages along with other short sentences: (1) ‘I have a sister’—for the composition on ‘Myself’, and (2) ‘My mother cooks for me’—for another one on ‘My Mother’. I went for an interrogation. First question: ‘Why did you write that you have a sister? You DON’T!’ Her reply: ‘Miss wrote it, so I had to write it.’ Then I asked: ‘Didn’t you tell her that your mother doesn’t cook?’ ‘I did, but she said it’s alright to write it, because sometimes you make dishes', she replied. 

Afterwards I asked her to write sentences about herself and about her mother on her own.

This small incident made me think deeply what we are doing to our children in schools. It was just two days back that one of my ex-students who happens to teach at an English medium school in Dhanmondi was telling me, ‘I don’t see wonder in the little children’s eyes’, and expressed her fear whether we are creating programmed human beings instead of letting them learn.

When I look back on my school days I can relate to this kind of incidents easily when we had to memorize a ten-sentence paragraph on a particular topic and write the same in the exam scripts. But that was a long time ago! Shouldn’t things change as the world is moving faster now? Shouldn’t our teaching style change to hone critical thinking skills of our students? Shouldn’t we let our children grow up by exploring? The credit that we give to Dhaka-based schools leaving the rest to their unfortunate conditions is not a ‘credit’ at all, if children go through rote learning at schools these days.

In a specific part of a 12 minute video (Module 04, Pair and Group Work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woNZzjJL9bQ) by University of Oregon under their project ‘Shaping the Way We Teach English’ we see that a teacher makes groups in the class after explaining the task. Four children in a group read a text on sockeye salmon and choose and write a sentence on the specific given topic in the given coloured paper and hand it over to the teacher who in turn put those individual sentences together to form a paragraph on the board. As the children sit on the rugs in front of the board leaving their chairs and tables, she discusses the sentences with the children.

What is interesting to notice from the close up shots of the group work is the group members help each other with locating the required sentence from the text, spelling out the sentence to the writer, finding mistakes in the writing etc. In the process, children learn about the food, habitat etc. of sockeye salmon by ‘doing’ something together. In this process the learning actually sticks to them. A few also make mistakes, but that is not a hindrance to learning. They also learn from that mistake and they retain the learning.

According to the Russian psychologist Alexander Zaporozhets, there are two parallel cultural universes—the adult’s and the child’s. Consequently, there are two possible approaches for child educators. We can attempt to take children by the scruff of the neck and drag them into the adult culture, attempting to move them prematurely to the next stage of development. Alternatively, we can allow children to live through their childhood as fully as possible, nut work to help them deepen and enrich their child’s eye view. In our country educators seem to do the first. Galina Dolya in a book titled Vygotsky in Action in the Early Years: The ‘Key to Learning’ Curriculum clarifies ‘developmental education’ by helping children move forward. ‘To do this it must provide challenging experiences that are enjoyable and achievable given the right support.’

Children need the proper nurturing, moulding from the world around them so that they can do things by themselves analytically and creatively. The world that surrounds them now is a fast-paced world. They are techno savvy/digital natives. If the schools fail to tap on the ways by which they learn and they are used to, we all have to take the responsibility. Parents and teachers alike should take the role of nurturer so that the young minds can grow up with all their potentials and contribute meaningfully to the society, the country. Or, one day they will shout at us singing ‘We don’t need no education.’