Price for stressful living
S. DANDAPANI
We are living in troubled times. We rarely get time and freedom to stand and stare like the celebrated poet William Wordsworth! Quite unwittingly, we get trapped in a “Time-machine.” We get accustomed, much against our nature, to a kind of routine from dawn to dusk and even beyond! Our life seemed to be programmed inflexibly, inexorably. Evidently, we are brought up that way and habits die hard. We bring up our kids too to adapt themselves to this regimen. Any
deviation or relaxation would be resented, frowned upon and voted out. Our nervous system is conditioned to such a punishing schedule, with poor prospects of respite. Quite inadvertently, we hurt ourselves. We hurt the helpless kids too to conform to such a standardised schooling.
Life in a metropolis gets standardised more and more. Pavlov and Skinner subjected animals and birds to a kind of standardised behaviour. Seldom did they imagine that their theories would make human beings the guinea pigs! We are depriving children of their freedom to be what they should submit/succumb. Not a day would pass without a plethora of do’s and don’ts, should’s and shouldn’ts!
Fast pace syndrome
“Hurry up, hurry up, it’s getting late to school. Get up, get up, brush, wash, dress, gulp and bite and be ready to board the school-bus! Look there! Your friend is already ready with his bulging bag! Collect yours, stuff them into your rucksack. Go, go, go!” Such refrains fill every home and flat. No deliverance from this rigmarole! Why are we driving mercilessly, rather sadistically, innocent innocuous kids, who might like to curl up in cosy beds a little longer than the clock-watching mother and father? Why do we coerce them to a kind of standardised life so early in the threshold of their living? Would the heavens fall if we allowed them a little more freedom — to be what they want to be than fit into a straight-jacketed schooling? Why do we compare them always with their class fellows and generate a kind of inferiority complex and low self-esteem?
“Your children are not your children./They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself; They come through you but not from you,/Yet they belong not to you.” (Kahlil Gibran)
Freedom sacrificed
As kids converge in the classroom, they get conditioned to the silence of a cemetery, a standardised teaching of text book content, stereotyped testing and back-breaking homework — all aimed at reducing children to abject submission or slavery. Whoever rebelled and failed to adhere to this kind of bonded labour would be given a dressing down. Report cards would become case sheets, making kids culprits for culpable dereliction.
The movie ‘Taare Zameen Par’ reminds parents and teachers to break the shackles of standardisation and to look at kids as freedom-loving creatures like butterflies and birds, to hop from branch to branch and enjoy schooling for a few years at least before plunging into serious studying. It is also a warning to the fatal mistake of bloated expectations most parents cherish and nourish for their children. Until parents and teachers learn to allow a child to be free from the shackles of standardised schooling, we would only be producing robots than healthy human beings!
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