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Education Plus
RIGHT TURN
Losing childhood
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Take on students' test of nerves
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TOUGH GRIND: The rat race that starts early for children usually results in their burnout.
“A cat breaks two legs if it jumps from two feet. How many does it break by jumping from two-and-half feet?” I asked a boy, who replied, “Two-and-half legs”. He is from an institution that taught him rapid mathematics five hours a day. He is really good in multiplications and is able to multiply a four digit number with another three digit one within a minute. The proud parents claim that he is brilliant in maths, but they do not understand what the boy lacks.
A recent article in a magazine explained at length the rat race that starts early for kids because of their ambitious parents, resulting in a burnout and much more than that -- losing their childhood.
Neighbour’s envy
With “our child-neighbour’s envy” concept, the rat race begins from the womb. A woman claimed that when she was pregnant, she placed a tape recorder near her womb and “taught her six-month-old foetus” various subjects like literature, history and science.
Taking inspiration from the stories of Prahlada and Abhimanyu, she strongly believed that the baby would be ahead of other students in her kindergarten school. “We did this to our first son also. The result is excellent,” claimed the parents. They enrolled their one-year-old son in a brain activity school that promises ‘twin brain development, baby yoga, concentration games and baby Einstein DVD concept’.
“I don’t believe in punishing my child for his lapses. I have different methods to make him stand as a first ranker,” said another woman to me. “When he got 89 marks and the class first was 91, I cut my finger. He wept seeing my blood, pain and started studying well.”
Show case pieces
“Like their wealth, gold and building interiors, the children have also become status enhancers for the parents,” says Van Ryan, who authored the book ‘The Show Case Piece’.
He gives four reasons for hyper-parenting: Their own academic failures, frustrated ambitions, guilt feeling for not being able to spend more time with the children and… the kick of being able to exhibit their child’s achievement before others.
‘Thoroughbred’ is the word used for the race horse rigorously trained for its purpose. There is nothing wrong in building a child’s bright future. But do you know that there is a school that teaches sixth class students for admission into another school that coaches them for entrance test into Ramaiah’s coaching centre which in turn gives training for IIT entrance?
YANDAMOORI VEERENDRANATH
yandamoori@hotmail.com
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