The kids aint dumb

Since my school days, when I started to develop an opinion on the happenings around me, I have always been critical of any attempts made to insult the intelligence of young children. I guess being adults, the distance that age puts between us and the children, makes us adopt this know-all, condescending attitude. The sophisticated name of course is ‘generation gap’. But my argument is not so much against this inevitable differing of viewpoints between two sets of people who stand at different co-ordinates of the time graph. My problem is with ignoring how the world has changed since the time we were in childhood and thinking that our kids are not smart enough. Two recent incidents reminded me of this belief and prompt these words.

My 12 year old cousin Karan lives and studies in Canada. An ice hockey and baseball freak, he isn’t too far away from his Indian roots as well. With relatives around, he takes sadistic pleasure in subjecting us all to his smattering of Hindi and Punjabi, often mixing up his tenses, phrases and expressions (‘I touch your feet’ becomes for him ‘Mein aapke pair khaata hoon’). Of course, all his Hindi is purely picked up from the television serials that his grandmother watches and which he is forced to watch as well as he waits for the commercials to catch his sports action. You might pass him off as any other North American Indian kid with his brown skin, accent and possessing knowledge of Indian customs that marriages, gurudwara trips or diwali gatherings have afforded him. But he possesses two qualities that would mark any kid out - inquisitiveness and observance. Out on a drive in the city with his parents, me and my mother, he started off on his usual trip of speaking broken, illogical Hindi. It was all fine before he suddenly turned towards my mother and asked her, ‘Aap Hindu ho yaan Punjabi?’

His mother wasn’t exactly enthused with the question and quickly responded with a ‘Karan, you don’t ask such questions.’ She turned to me and explained how schools in Canada discourage students from asking about the religious identities of those around them. At first glance, you would perfectly understand this dilemma of a newly multicultural and multi religious society. A society in which public display of religion is not common and not stressed. A secular state that would want religion to be confined only in the homes and places of worship of those who follow it. A state which perhaps believes that asking a person’s religion and acknowledging its difference from your own in the first step in societal segregation.

I must admit that at first I felt a degree of understanding towards this approach; till of course Karan came up with his response,

‘No! I am asking because agar aap Hindu ho to why don’t you have a bindi here (pointing to my mother’s forehead) and red colour (now pointing at her hair above the forehead) like all other Hindu women’

For a moment, we were all silent in the car. Karan’s dad, not exactly sympathizing earlier with his mother’s admonishment, announced triumphantly
‘See! He has a logic for his question’ And indeed he did. None of us knew where this kid had picked up concepts of vermillion and bindis. And how he had come to know its significance for a Hindu woman. His probing of religious identity was not to place a mark of segregation or assert affirmation with those around him, but simply an attempt to obtain cultural understanding. And in that sense we were all wrong to assume that his mind, even in today’s religiously charged and to an extent divided world, would function only on one dimension – a dimension of creating and not breaking walls.
I wondered later whether that tiny episode had a lesson for all us. Is denial of identity and closing of mouths to discuss it another form of segregation? Are we creating walls or breaking them when we seek to create a society where school kids are ignorant of the diversity of the cultures that they inhabit? And as liberals are we correct in being so squeamish about discussing religion with our children? Is it so hard for us to educate them and then set them on the path of moderation and tolerance? Why are we allowing Osama bin Laden and not our school teachers to introduce our children to their religion?

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The second episode relates to a 14 year old boy Siddharth, the son of one of my mother’s old friends from office. I recently visited him and by chance my curiosity forced me to have a look at his school textbooks. I was sort of making impromptu comparisons on the extent of change in the NCERT textbooks from 11 years ago when I was in the same class in which Siddharth studies today. In the middle of my exploration I chanced to lay my hands on a colorful and deftly prepared paper folder which had his details written on the face of it with some skillful crayon work.
‘My holiday homework’, informed Siddharth. ‘I had to do two book reports’. Inside were two pages of a A4 size containing his ‘book report’. I read the first one. It was on ‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martel. As I read those five hundred odd words that he had written. I was a little amazed at the quality of the language as well at the abrupt nature of the presentation of the report. Siddharth probably sensed it,
‘I copied it from the internet’. That explained it. Schoolboy level detailing mixed with book review level kind of passages. When I asked why, he responded laconically that ‘who had the time to write so much’ and that he had done his report in the last week of his vacations. Now I am someone who really isn’t enthused about people substituting originality with Google, but I carried on as Siddharth next placed in my hands his holiday homework list. It was a bunch of 4 pages photocopied and stapled together (just the way it used to happen in my time – it seems the idea of mass computer prints is yet to strike any one in our schools). The contents of that homework did not carry any surprises for me. The only addition in the quality of the work required from the students, in the space of a decade, has come in the form of a Disaster Management project mandated by the CBSE. The holiday homework had a section for each subject. The sciences & mathematics required students to answer a set of questions which were nothing but a revision of either what they had studied before leave or would study out after leave. The social sciences and grammar subjects too could not think beyond the realms of the textbooks. In fact I was shocked to see that the Hindi homework required students to write a letter inviting their friend over to their birthday party! I remember writing such a letter when I was in class 3 and that was a good 17 years ago! Of course, in the world of CBSE, our schools and Indian education they still believe that a kid writes and posts letters to all his friends asking them to attend his birthday celebrations. The concepts of telephone and emails are as far away as the third millennium.

In short there was nothing in that bunch of papers that could have challenged Siddharth’s imagination and creativity. Perhaps the only thing that he would have enjoyed doing was preparing the cover of his book review.

What is wrong with our teachers and our schools? Why can’t we leave textbooks and courses aside for a month and a half in the year and let our kids THINK? Is it so hard to ask them to chuck their books and prepare a 5-6 page project on something that they have interest in? (Siddharth has an active liking for cars. In a brief span of twenty minutes he had given me all the gyaan about the new models hitting the Indian market). Why can’t we allow our children to be creative for once and escape the drudgery of ‘Answer the following in your own words’? I am not proposing that every kid has a fountain of creativity bubbling inside him but then is it so hard to assume that when faced with acting around a topical interest not just kids but even elder men find hidden reserves of imagination and creativity? And is it so difficult for schools to see that a diversified range of interests in their students will automatically lead to an enhancement of knowledge sharing between the kids themselves? Why are we allowing the unimaginative to recklessly suppress the imagination of our kids?

But of course these are vain questions; because from what I saw with Siddharth I was certain of one fact. Dinosaurs can reappear on our planet but to expect changes in the manner in which we teach our kids is asking for a little too much. On this teacher’s day, sample this thought.

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