Stress-free studies

The country could be glad that no less a person than President Mahinda Rajapaksa has taken up the cause of our harried primary and secondary school students. A couple of days back he presided over a high-powered meeting which discussed the issue of school text books, which 'educational tools' are more of a burden than a source of enlightenment and learning for many of our students.

This problem has been allowed to hang fire for far too long. Decades ago, primary and secondary education was not as burdensome as it is today, mainly on account of the fact that school text books were relatively easy to read and digest, besides being comparatively short.

This is not the case today and the problems of the helpless students are compounded by the highly competitive and stressful public examinations they are compelled to face quite early in life. Why has education to be so great a 'mill-stone' strung to the necks of the country's children and a more or less cut-throat competition- oriented affair? Could the educational big-wigs who charter the academic direction for the young of this country answer this pertinent query?

Learning must ideally be 'fun' and not a harrowing nightmare. Unfortunately, for very many of our youngsters, education is more the latter than the former, for, of course, no fault of theirs. Most of their text books are bulky and unwieldy and there is no doubt that even their teachers would find them boring in the extreme. Take, for example, the Social Science text books of our secondary grades. This subject is really a hot-potch of history, geography, civics and even some economics, rendered most uninterestingly, drably, abstractly and very voluminously. Whereas what is required is a highly imaginative approach to teaching the subject, all that one is presented with, mainly, is a boring mass of words.

Therefore, the student population of this country, their parents and elders, could take deep satisfaction from the fact that the problems of the education sphere are receiving the attention of the President and his team of ministers. It is not only the approaches to teaching and connected issues that the authorities and the country need to ponder over.

There is also the very vital question of the pressures generated for our students by the pronouncedly examination-orientation and unnecessarily competitive nature of our education system.

Time and again the country has been cautioned against the ill-effects of exposing our children at a very early age to strenuous public examinations.

The year 5 scholarship examination which has the unfortunate consequence of condemning the vast number of candidates as failures, is a case in point, considering that the majority of candidates find it difficult to reach the relevant cut-off point in marks, required for admission to schools that are seen as good.

Mental health authorities have time and again cautioned the country against persisting on this highly tragic path of creating 'failures' in numbers, whereas the rationale for clinging to these educational practices is hard to find. It should be remembered that all those who are thus labeled as 'failures' at so early an age, would in all probability be suicide-prone and see themselves as useless. Thus, it could be clearly seen that our children are being put through very harmful practices, whereas, the world should be made a better place for all of them.

The foregoing considerations call for a revolutionary paradigm change in the ways in which we mould our education and school system. Given that every human is precious and special, why is it that outdated educational processes are being held on to by us? Why should not our educational system aim at bringing out the very best in the human and not relegate them to the ranks of the useless? Hopefully, these and many other questions would set the educational authorities thinking. The President's posers should be seen as a good kick-off point for further investigations.