Warped in a wired, weird time

How we wished the sun could have gone down a bit later as we perched on a branch of a litchi tree a few yards off our house in a small town. If the sunset had been delayed, we could have played around a little more, without having to get back to the house, into the room, and start hearing: ‘get back to business and start studying’.

We were young children then, a year or two into schooling. We had not much of technological innovation to keep us busy with, neither did our parents; for our fathers, there was the job and for our mothers, spending time chatting with neighbours after all the cooking, and the social pleasantries.

Few well-off families would own large radios. There were the cinemas, where we went, once a month, holding the hands of our mothers and aunts. There were sports events and cultural programmes in the neighbourhood, taking place almost every year. We would also visit a circus once a year.

Yet, we would be busy all day long just the way children now are. We would run across the road to pluck flowers from plants lining along, we would jump on mounds of sand, piled up for building construction, we would perch on trees the way the monkeys we read in books, or heard from parents, do or we would run into bushes. When we grew up a bit more, we even dared to dip our feet into the canal that passed by our house.

We had been talked to, on various occasions, for a few such adventurous jobs, at the age that we were, but it was fun growing up all along, carefree of a sort. Although we grew up hearing ‘get back to business and start studying’ almost every day, we were spared of being forced to fight for top positions in classes.

Our parents would be sad if we flunked; they would scold us for our poor results and even wield a few canes (glad that corporal punishment in schools has gone and some children are still given such punishment in classrooms flouting the government ban that the High Court ordered in August 2010 and the High Court ruling of January 2011 that criminalised corporal punishment in educational institutions but we hope that the situation will change for the fairer; we had faced plenty, by our teachers and parents alike, for not doing homework, for not learning by rote pages after pages, for failing to do well in maths and for breaking discipline) but they had never got on our nerves saying that unless we came out first, the tradition of education in the family would fall through.

They would never set us on a race for the top position as some parents now do. In a population with poor education, schooling was perhaps what kept our parents happy that time. Now that the literacy rate have increased and more people receive schooling, children coming out first in classes is what parents seem to aim for to keep status. We had one more thing to boast of — we had to haul a handful of books and fewer exercise books and our parents did not have to carry the bag up to the school gates.

Children should be let in playgrounds or open spaces to make a mess, jump, run and shout. When children first notice an ant coming up and going down a grass in a large green ground, they take delight in the thought that they were the first in the world to feel how the ants that go up and down a leaf feel that their world were bounded by a space not far off the leaf or the grass while the children’s world is bounded by a larger area, greater than even the playgrounds.

This is what perhaps every child thinks or feels when they notice any ripple in their surroundings, caused by ants, butterflies, whistling birds, falling leaves or pecking hens. These have been happening since the beginning of the world and grownups are little bothered about things going up and coming down, fluttering in the air, flowing or blowing gently across the road. But young children need to explore and take risks in playgrounds and open spaces for gross motor development and basic knowledge.

In a time (wirelessly) wired — with mobiles, video games and tabs — and weird that takes away time from their play, outdoor activities let children be like children. We are forcing an unwarranted maturity of a sort on these young children, shut up indoors with pent-up energy, constrained by unsafe neighbourhoods and educational burden, hampering their physical and mental development and making them inept at social skills.

They say that it takes a village to raise a child. However, parents these days, including the people who run the state and govern the country, have only constrained the proverbial village being confined to a room, equipped with modern innovations, only to arrest the development of our children.

We have not been able to create or protect playgrounds or outdoor spaces for children in our neighbourhood. We have also failed to set up schools with playgrounds or to protect the playgrounds that were already there in schools. Vertical concrete boxes are now replacing horizontal open spaces in almost every school.

We play another foul with our children once they become old enough to enter schools. Teachers expect these young children to pass tests, do certain homework and score certain marks in all these tests. Parents pressure them to outperform others in the classrooms. The happiness and satisfaction that the children are become tensed, worried and depressed.

We have sent our children to schools to learn, basic knowledge at the primary, some generalised knowledge at the secondary and some specialised knowledge at the tertiary levels. But this does not happen because of the pressure and the worries. All parents want to see their children at the top position but not all can come out first in a class that has more than 40 students.

We hear teachers complaining that the performance of some children in maths, English, drawing or even dancing are not up to scratch. Anyone scored below 90 per cent of marks are more often regarded as struggling while the student who comes out first has scored a little over than 95 per cent of marks. Teachers, who are supposed to hone out and shape intelligence in children, often gets on them, setting them out for information that might lead to good results in exams for better jobs in their later life.

Everyone talks about becoming engineers or physicians. No one talks about being writers, fashion designers or artists. Children doing poorly in maths are looked down up but they are in a good stead to become artists or writers, where maths will have nothing to do. They are made to struggle with a whole bunch of subjects, from Bangla to environment studies and that too in primary classes. Teachers and parents focused more on information than on knowledge only narrow down perspectives of the children towards the world.

We have grown up hearing our parents talking to us saying if we could spend all our time on studies at the young age, we would have plenty of time to while away after we grew up. That did not happen. It never so happens.

In addition to the daunting educational accountability, children are also made to haul books that are way off their capability to carry on the back. This physical burden on them also results from the educational burden, with more books on a number of subjects that could be done away with, thick exercise and copy books in two sets for class and homework, sometimes hardbound having the emblem and name of the schools imprinted, geometry and colouring pencil boxes, and the needed snack boxes and water bottles.

Research shows that schoolbags should weigh not more than 10 per cent of the weight of the children; a 15 per cent weight could be damaging. International studies further show that many young children, in developed countries, visit physicians with complaints of backache. Children here also suffer from backache as in many cases schoolbags weigh more than 20 per cent of their body weight but they are hardly noticed either because of the carelessness of parents and teachers or their lack of awareness of the matter.

We have had our childhood, easy and sort of free of care. Now when we have become parents, we have failed to ensure such easy childhood for our children. What if they stand up to us one day and ask if we have given them a playful, joyous childhood? There will be no words for us but to stand and look at them in helplessness. Will the policy planners answer?

Akkas, Abu Jar M (2014 July 11) Warped in a wired, weird time. New Age 8

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