Who Taught You What?

 

Take a Good Long Look and Read On

This picture popped up on someone's Linked In feed today and my initial reaction was to respond with a thumbs up.  It's like, literally the first thing that one does when seeing an attractive post. And then you do the next thing, which is share it.  Copy-share, copy-share .. and eventually you sit down and think.

Subjects That Should Be Mandatory in Schools - really?  And the occasion trumpeted was "World Teacher's Day" apparently.  So, suddenly, as a former teacher and self-proclaimed educationist, I am now on the defensive backfoot position.  And I am not talking about the picture in the 2nd position, 2nd Row.  Or even the 3rd position, same row.

My take on this is, just like the swimming and tennis coaching classes, perhaps most of these so-called subjects can be taught quite effectively at home, where the child spends the maximum time.  You do the math with 6 hours at school, 6 days a week with luck, 6 months a year (well, close enough - in the place where I live we have around 180 days off in the year).  So, with all that time on their hands, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and kindly neighbours can have a field day "teaching" all these life skills to kids. I am sure life has taught them all this and so they now feel it should be made mandatory at school. Why? So that they can spend quality time at WhatsApp University, Facebook and Linked In, solving the world's problems or laughing at them while their kids languish in ignorance. 

The old joke goes something like this:  If kids are expected to learn all the subjects, why can't the teacher teach all the subjects? And then some, as is being suggested in this visual. While I have opined elsewhere that a teacher is fundamentally a multi-skilled, polymath who can do and will do a large number of things, I think putting these on the "curriculum" would be a stretch of imagination as well as a stretch of ability for anyone.  So here's my proposal:

Teach these skills on the street, at home, at parties, at clubs and social and religious events - but don't imagine that schools are going to make these skills mandatory.  Let me take some examples.

Taxes.  For a parent who regularly evades taxes, finds work arounds or uses the Indian jugaad, it makes little sense for his little Munna to learn the proper methods. Like a few other good habits, it might just become what Moral Science classes used to be - learning good behaviour from a book and cheating your way through the exam to give the teacher what she wants.

In the same way I would like to lump Personal Finance and Insurance into the same basket.  Kids will learn what they can emulate from the people around them. There are different economic levels in the classroom. A child whose parents are living on the edge will have very little space to think about investments, insurance and other such goodies. So, again, it becomes an academic exercise.

Cooking and Home Repair are useful things to know - we used to teach this to Scouts. But what do vegans need to know about how to slice a chicken? And then daals of various types are as assorted as the states in our country.  YouTube will insist that Chana Masala is made with this specific recipe at which the King of Daals in the South will sneer.  Perhaps learning how to use YouTube effectively might be a better skill. And what exactly does home repair entail?  I know a student who knows more about fixing a tiled roof than repairing a leaky tap. That's because he lives in a tiled house and fetches water from a well.  But God help him if he has to pass in Fixing a Broken Switch. Will they have Cleaning an Oil Lamp as an alternative?

Does anyone have a proposed syllabus for Survival Skills?  Say, for living in the hills of Uttarkhand where landslides might occur?  Or perhaps in the mangroves of the Sunderbans, dealing with floods?  Or is it limited to sewing a vagrant button on a shirt? All the Social Etiquette I was taught at school would be needed for me to suppress a sarcastic remark (I was taught sarcasm by my teachers, too).

Car Maintenance - now that's a good one.  Really useful.  Changing a tyre, cleaning a car, ... what else? Buying a car? Or will that come under Investments and Personal Finance?  Taking the bus, knowing the routes, learning the map - these might actually be more effective, eventually. I am also trying to picture the average teacher, on her moped, teaching car maintenance.  

Self-defense. The picture is confusing. It looks like one of those Chinese or Japanese martial arts actions. I thought dealing with bullying and assault by peers and teachers was a more prevalent problem than getting mugged on the street. But yes, let's beat up a few teachers while we are at it.  It's been done before.

Of all of the above, I believe the most useful skill and one that MUST be taught at school is Public Speaking.  Not only the art and science of making speeches, but also the fearlessness of speaking out one's mind, the freedom to criticize positively and not get raided by the various agents of Government. But then teachers too need to learn to speak out against oppressive managements! 

Ah, did I leave out Coding?  We have moved into the era of No Code Programming and Artificial Intelligence.  Kids are doing things without code.  If we want to shape logical thinking skills, bring back Geometry with its theorems and riders! 

Stress will manage itself if we don't stress teachers into thinking they are responsible for our kids' upbringing.  Would love to hear your views. 

The big learning from this is not to react to pretty pictures with Likes and Thumbs-ups. Critical Thinking - now that's a skill I would recommend.  But how will we give marks for it?