Life is a never-ending school which no one can leave at his/her own wish. It teaches him to live in harmony with others, fulfill his responsibilities, take care of his/her loved ones and tackle difficulties sensibly. S/He is supposed to learn a new lesson everyday from the experiences s/he gets from his/her surroundings. But it is the basic nature of humans to forget the mistakes s/he commits and repeat it. S/He ignores her/his past and chases the future without learning anything from the present. I think that child is a teacher of life, a mirror which reflects how we should be and not what we are.
Often child is considered to be a blessing of God rather than an individual in its own right. But I feel children are as capable of having their own feelings and reactions as any adult around them. They have an urge to learn and share new things. Their raw mind is void of corrupted thoughts and so their actions teach us the most essential elements of behavior. This is where I think it is appropriate to express why I think that child is a teacher. Paulo Coelho said that “A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires.” .When I recollect my memories from childhood, there are so many instances which make me realise that a child is truly a teacher in so many aspects of life. Childhood for me is that phase of life when a human not only learns how to nurture the social and ethical values but also teaches people around him/her that the happiness of life rests in its simplicity.
“Most studies find plurality of childhoods in India, varying with family structure, socio-cultural, economic and political setting, birth-order, gender, etc.” (Saraswathi, 1999; Chaudhary 2004, cited in Bisht, 2008, p.154).
True, as I think of my childhood, I understand that all these factors play a crucial role in moulding one’s life right from birth. The hierarchical system of families imbibes different cultural and moral assets in a child which s/he carries forward with pride and teaches the next generation too. When a child is born, with him takes birth a mother. She learns how to be patient when child does not obey her, not let her work, not let her take rest. She learns how to forgive even if the child hurts her physically or psychologically. She learns how to care and not expect anything in return. In other words, if I say that a mother is the first teacher of her child, then the child itself teaches its mother, the qualities which no other teacher in the world can inculcate in her. Defining childhood is a difficult task but I have tried to give my understanding of childhood based on my personal experience as well as observations.
Children are curious minds. Inquisitiveness guides them on the path of knowledge and plays an important role in future.We may not get answer to every question but to some and this is the best way to learn from observations and answers to endless questions. Children teach us that we will never learn if do not ask.A child does not give up when s/he makes a mistake. Instead, it looks into what went wrong and tries to avoid it next time. It indirectly shows us that mistakes are often openings to new experiences and lead us to progress later.
The ability to simplify matters and provide a productive way to solve a problem is very peculiar in children. It does not have the cognitive level of thinking so rationally but it needs reason to justify it. A child has respect and appreciation for everyone in its eyes. For him/her, everyone is special and of equal importance. For a teacher also every student is unique and he tries to give attention to each of them and make them understand in simplest way possible. A child lives in its world of imagination where possibilities are endless. It looks at the world with open mind and so nothing restrains it from thinking out of the box. If we present an adult and a child with a problem, the child will try to give the simplest perception while adult will complicate it because his/her imagination is confined by many factors such as society, family, emotions, status etc. But a child is the teacher who gives us the freedom to consider various ways of interpreting a difficulty.
Children delve into every aspect of their surroundings and look at every small thing which teaches them something and then they share it with others. Adults fail to make such observations because they have a macro-view of world and ignore things which do not matter to them directly. As we grow up, we forget how well we learned when we were young by simply observing others.One quality that everyone should definitely learn from a child is forgiveness. They are much unsullied and do not keep any bad feelings about others in their minds even if someone does wrong to them. They tend to forget easily and forgive without hesitation. As grown-ups, we start caring more about our self-esteem than the feelings of others and eventually end up losing relations.
I feel as we grow up, we learn how to conceal our feelings, manipulate them for our benefit and make it difficult for others to understand what is on our mind. But a child is honest to itself and to others about its feelings. It has that instinct to sense who is a good person and who has evil intentions. Children teach us that not only should we be true to our inner selves but also be honest to others because it avoids misunderstandings and helps us in being sincere in relationships. Loving unconditionally is very difficult because human being is selfish in nature. He seldom gives anything without expecting something in return. Whereas a child teaches us that doing little things for others and not anticipating anything in return gives more pleasure.
Having considered the prominent and possible characteristics of childhood that I have experienced and observed around, it is inevitable to discuss how a child develops into a civilized and cultured human being. It is also important to think about the factors which contribute to its growth in becoming what I have called a teacher and how the perception of childhood may vary from culture to culture and place to place.
To begin with the Nature/Nurture issue, I would like to give an example from my personal experience to explain this. I have a niece named Riya who is six years old now. When she was about two and a half year old, she started talking and would refer to her things in third person-“Riya’s doll, Riya’s dress”, etc. It was only after we taught her that she began saying “my dress, my doll”. Before that she used to give and share her stuff with other children in her vicinity. But once she started identifying things to be her own, she refrained from sharing her toys or clothes with anyone. This is where the nature/nurture part comes into play. The quality of sharing what it has, let it be some material or knowledge, is innate in a child. But when it grows up, we teach him/her to keep their stuff for themselves. We tell them not to disclose the knowledge that they have so that others do not benefit from it. Every child is noble and likes to spread whatever is in its mind. But the kind of upbringing that he gets decides to a great extent what he will become later in life. Thus, it is very important to nurture this beautiful attribute of sharing knowledge with others which is there in a child’s heart by nature.
While dealing with the Activity/Passivity issue, the debate may go like this- for example, some people think that being inquisitive about surroundings helps a child progress and become aware of reality that s/he is bound to face some day or the other which eventually is shared by her/him to help others, i.e. s/he plays an active role in building her/his personality as a teacher. On the other hand, it is also believed that external influence such as stimulating environment at home or in contrast, too much restriction on exploring world around develops this curiosity which makes the child what s/he is. This means the society has the most influential part in creating an individual. I think it is very important that a child has an active role in his learning years because what s/he learns from firsthand experience remains with her/him for a lifetime. But passive learning is something which may not seem significant that time but comes to its mind when situation arises like latent learning.
Continuity/Discontinuity issue is a bit confusing because the changes that occur during human development are not visibly obvious always. Let me take an example of a child who plays various games with his/her siblings. His/her mother gives him/her some innovative games which involve mathematical tricks. It interests him/her and he/she starts playing with numbers and teaches his/her siblings as well. This is a continuous change in his/her behavior since it also helps him/her in studies and acts as an exercise for the brain. On the other hand, as s/he grows up, the complexity of problems s/he faces increases but her/his skill to apply various methods on problems helps her/him and thus s/he builds up her/his knowledge in mathematics. Thus, although the capability developed continuously, the skills got more honed in stages which were discontinuous.
For explaining the Qualitative/Quantitative issue, I take example of a child who grasps languages very easily. When the child is about one year old, s/he learns his mother-tongue first. This is qualitative change as s/he learns how to express herself/himself. After s/he starts interacting with people in neighbourhood and school, s/he learns more languages, suppose Hindi and English as well. This is what quantitative change is which improves the quality of his competence of acquiring language skills with time and may help in becoming a proficient teacher in future.
The Universality/Particularity issue is quite interesting in the sense that it is not confined to various countries around the world but to various states within a country, various cultures within a state, various families within a culture and finally from individual to individual. The equality with which a child treats everyone let it be her/his parents, his siblings, his friends, the servants at his home, is something which we should learn and maintain throughout our lives. But this characteristic in a child depends largely on the culture he is being raised in. If I take an example of Indian society, at a very young age, children are not able to differentiate people into various classes that the society has created, so they respect and love all the people around them equally and this perspective of development is universal. But in many states and particularly in patriarchal communities, the female members are not treated well or in some families the servant class people are not even considered as human and highly disregarded. This has a bad effect on the children who tend to follow this trend which affects their behaviour for complete life. Thus, the socio-economic and family structure again has the maximum impression on how a child develops into a capable teacher of values in future.
Here, I want to share a story of a girl who actually inspired me to think of this metaphor for a child. For a child, love and caring from both mother and father is needed. But when one of the parents is not there, it becomes very difficult for a child to live in the society like any other child. When Ankita was just one year old, her parents got separated because of some personal issues. Even before she could recognize her father properly, she was taken away from him and brought to a place where everyone had question in their eyes. How they will survive without a man’s support, what her future will be without a father, how she will learn the importance of a family, and many such questions which made no sense to that child then. But as she grew up, she understood that something is not right. She learnt ignoring the painful comments made on her mother and her own existence. Indirectly she taught me that to sustain in the society, you have to overlook what is unimportant and which may hinder your own progress.
Her mother worked with a meagre salary. Ankita knew that her mother managed their livelihood alone so she never demanded anything to her. She learnt being happy with minimum possible facilities and just with the basic needs. She made me realise that being a part of a family, we should understand the crisis and try to help in whatever way possible. Even though she herself had very few things to play with, she never refrained from sharing it with others. She believed that the more you share, the more happiness you get. She taught me that when things go awry, we should just laugh and move on because worrying is not a solution to any problem. Rather looking at it positively helps and we can become better human beings at every stage of life. She showed me how to be carefree, how to live life fully without missing a single moment of joy and excitement.
Thus, for me child is a teacher of life who can change the way we live. After we grow and eventually forget the beauty of innocence and simplicity that childhood holds within itself, only a child can remind us of it again. Even though not directly, but just by observing them, we learn so many things about life that once we also went through but let them go with the continuous severe flow of life. I just wish that either my childhood comes back or the child which is still somewhere in me stays there forever and keeps teaching me new lessons everyday to enrich my character in various ways.
References
American Psychological Association. Frequently asked questions. Retrieved August 30, 2013 from http://www.apastyle.org/learn/faqs/index.aspx
Bisht, R. (2008). Who is A Child? The Adults’ Perspective within Adult-child Relationship in India. Interpersona 2(2), 151-172. Jawaharlal Nehru University. Delhi
Kakar, S. (1981). The Inner World A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Second edition). Delhi: Sage Publications
Shaffer, D. (2007). Developmental Psychology Childhood and Adolescence (Fourth Edition). California: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.