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Thursday, 15 September 2011

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Where to, values?

What do you do, when you are just ten years old, have tried your best to pass an exam and missed a good portion of your childhood in doing so?

That’s the crux of little Lashan’s story. Lashan was hovering around the Principal’s office after the Grade 5 scholarship results were given out. When queried, little Lashan, tears brimming in his wide eyes, claimed his parents had warned him not to come home if he didn’t pass well enough to obtain a scholarship to a better, bigger school.

Recreational activities form an integral part of childhood development. Participating in leisure activities will strengthen children physically, mentally and make them brighter students

This is the story of most Sri Lankan children, whose parents focus on driving them to pass what is seen as the gateway to a good school. The parents have reason enough; they all want their children to achieve the dream of a good education, something they themselves could not. But the view from the children’s side often paints a pathetic picture - a childhood deprived, play time compromised on the altar of studies, the innocence of being a child, taken away too soon, replacing it with a long and tedious journey in search of academic brilliance.

Professional career

And the children dutifully go on to do justice to their parents relentless pursuit of a professional career. Many overcome economic hardships and other obstacles to become successful. But there are gaps left in their lives. Empty places that come back later in life to haunt them and their parents. The empty place within themselves is a place that was meant to harbour the values, the ethics, the aspects of life that often means more than a successful career and a fat bank balance.

In their pursuit of empowering the children with a dream, the parents often forget to give values their due place. As we all know, lives that have not been built centred on values become empty shells; people leading such lives may be successful but empty inside. In an ageing society such as ours, taking care of our elders has become and will become one of the greatest issues facing us.

Ageing parents

Increasingly, aged parents are left destitute, some lucky enough to find shelter in homes, others left by the roadside. If you care enough to stop a moment and seek out their stories, the tale would sound familiar; they spent every cent they had to educate the children. They then went further and gave the house they lived in, to the children. The children? Having become what their parents wanted them to, they no longer had any use for the ageing parents who were now a liability. What of the values? Values? What values? In the quest to study, study and study, no one had bothered with them. The parents didn’t teach the children and the children were too busy studying to find the time.

A long time ago, our society prided itself on its solid core values - that taught children to respect others, respect their elders, take care of the parents, care for one another. The rat race wasn’t here then. Yes, children were expected to do well but even if they didn’t, they could still live by the values, the traditions they were imbibed with. They lived by a code of honour and ethics. It was not all dog eat dog. Not yet. As much as they mean well, the parents often make the mistake of failing to give a balanced outlook. A good education is vital for a child but it must be balanced.

Value system

A sound education isn’t sound enough until you teach them the values alongside the education. If not, the children can become the ‘learned’ uneducated; it’s the values that add flavour to life, that keep the safety valves in place. Values teach children to do things that academic brilliance alone doesn’t. Values keep the society going.

Values teach children right from wrong. Values keep us safe from things we do not want to get into. A value system set in motion from early childhood serve as a guiding light for a lifetime.

To make matters worse, today’s children are born wired for the 21st century - they are tech savvy, able to make connections and are intelligent enough to start fiddling with an advanced phone or a computer from an early age. They are desperately in need of moral guidance and advice and must develop a strong value systems and ethics from an early age. Left otherwise, they will develop their own code, often based on self-centred pursuits, encouraged by a global culture that says self-gratification, irrespective of the cost to others, is in. Empathy has no place in that culture. Respecting parents, obeying parental and school authority, which also transforms into respect for the law and the community, is conspicuously absent from their lives.

Eye opener

The recent riots in UK were an eye opener to many parents who had long ago let go of parental authority. A lost generation of young people, some as young as ten or eleven, were hell bent on setting fire and causing mayhem in the streets. And their reason? Nothing beyond the fact that to them, it felt good to do what they did. And this in a country that once took pride in their values of parental authority, empathy, regard for law and order and respect for authority.

Irrespective of economic status, children on the whole are walking away from the kind of values that once gave them a strong grounding, an unshakable foundation of trust, discipline, ethics and honesty.

Some are being encouraged unknowingly by parents who only want to provide everything they could for the children. Tough love is what children need - as we have witnessed in developed societies, now reaping what has been sown, tough love is what will teach children responsibility and still make them feel loved.

It is still not too late for a generation to re-discover the values of a vanishing world. To discover that what makes a life worth the living is not a mere acquisition of material things but to be able to send our children into society well educated but also empowered with value that makes them above all, true human beings.

 

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