Why we have finalized Homeschool for our son?

Sometimes back, I was talking to an Educator friend (who thinks Educator word is a better representative of his role than teacher) and our discussions turned towards the memorization problem of our education. When I asked him whether he understood the gravity of the crisis I realized that he did not even understand the concept of memorization. He was taking this in literal sense when the issue is relative (IQ vs Memory).

So I gave him the example of my son-my 7 years old son who has almost 200 car toys and remarkably he remembers the source of each and every car. Sometimes he comes to me with a car and tells the source like that car I had bought for him when he was crying after he got his vaccination. And almost every child has this type of memory because they have fewer things to take care off and they are busy and wander in their own fantasy world. So is there any need to check and test their memory? They are already demonstrating that they are good in remembering things so is there any need to waste their precious time in proving that they have good memory. In fact best way to enhance their memory is to expose them to newer phenomenon routinely especially the things they like and prefer.

But in our schools, most of the study and time is oriented towards making them remember things and then more time is wasted in testing the same (exams/tests) when it serves no purpose and there will be minimal reward in their future life for the use of memory. What is the purpose in asking a 1^st /2^nd standard child to memorize a story and then taking exam/test of the same? By taking exam we are testing the memory only (which is not required at all at first) but there is no test to see whether he can apply the understandings/learning of the story in life or situations.

We humans build opinions when we see and comprehend things relative to us like when a child sees how bad he feels when his friend does not share the chocolate with him and this lays the foundation of opinion about sharing things with others. We can’t understand that which does not have its existence relative to us. Like can we make a child understand what is love? Why people die for love? No, we can’t because a child with his present physical and emotional development stage can’t comprehend this just like we can’t comprehend what our Sages/Gurus/Rishis mean when they urge us to rise beyond our present consciousness level to higher spiritual level to experience the vastness and greatness of life. We can’t comprehend when they say there is no death…when they die for the virtue.

So the consciousness and wisdom of a child is developed when he is exposed to the different phenomenon of the world. He makes his inferences about the phenomenon based on his present state of consciousness.

So we can direct our efforts in channelizing and exposing them to the phenomenon which is relevant to them like love story movies are worthless for them, English grammar is useless for them (they learn languages on their own with much more efficiency), General knowledge books are useless for them (I have seen questions about MS Dhoni in GK Book for 1st standard!!). But cartoons like Doraemon are much more helpful (even better than schools) as a child can relate to it as he lives the same type of life…his dreams are same. My son that day asked me about the time machine which Doraemon has and asked me whether he could meet his grandfather with the help of that machine by going back in time. I was surprised that he could understand the linear flow of time (although we are not sure about the linearity).

Every child understands and uses mathematics in his life but with things with which he is associated. You give them 5 cookies and takes away 1 and they can tell how many are left very easily as compared to the effort when we ask them to solve this one paper (5-1=?). Now, these numerical alphabets are foreign objects for them which they do not use in their daily life. Also, our mind thinks and understands phenomenon in pictures (we may not realize this but whatever I am writing here we are seeing a picture for every word/emotion in our mind running like a movie) so their mind can comprehend 5 cookies lined up on a paper but then cannot comprehend that “5” represents the count of anything numbered 5. For them it is a picture only but we still try to teach them math in this way only. I have seen the use of five things along with 5 but I feel whether we need to teach and force mathematics on them in this boring way or in a way which they use in their daily life.

IQ is about application of Data/Knowledge

At present, in our schools children (7-8 years) are being forced to sit for 7 hours studying GK, Grammar, and EVS which are useless for them. When I put my son to a Nagpur school they have asked us to bought books on some 7-8 subjects. But CBSE rules provides for only 3 subjects: Hindi, English and Maths but there were extra subjects like GK, EVS, Science, and English Grammar and all these are strictly prohibited by court, NCERT and CBSE. Even the honorable Madras High court Judge was shocked and surprised to note that Grammar and Computer science have been studied in class 1. To teach these useless subjects children are being forced to sit for 7 hours in schools. I raised the issue with the management of the school and to my surprise they replied that the curriculum and time is just like other schools in the Nagpur and it is the benchmark. But I told them that the benchmark is decided by CBSE/NCERT not by schools. For this they had no answer.

I immediately realized that they don't have the IQ to understand the uselessness of forcing these books on small children. I have seen these schools shouting “IQ-IQ” all the time in their promotions but after my interactions with so many of them I have realized that they do not understand this at all. I asked about this to so many educators I have met and their fully confident answer was that it is about the intelligence. But how and why-they do not have any clue at all.

Once I gave one example on this to some of my friends. I am detailing the same here. I am an investor and pick stocks after detailed study about the business. I was having one stock- Praj industries ltd which is one of the most innovative company in India and their main business is to set up plants to produce Ethanol from Molasses/sugarcane which is called 1^st generation Bio fuel. Then they were focusing on producing 2G bio fuel from the bio wastes like Wood chips, rice husk etc. So one day I was sitting with some of my friend and we were discussing this issue and then one of my friend said that 2G bio fuel may not be possible as there is no technology to extract or synthesize fuel from grass, wood etc.

At that time I had done the study of Enzyme industry for finding a stock related to enzymes. I had also completed the study of Dairy industry. So at once something flashed in my mind and I told my friend that this activity of extracting energy from wood, grass is already being done. My shocked friends asked where. I told them about the cow. A cow uses special set of enzymes to convert the tough and complex matter like cellulose into energy so we can also extract these enzymes from them and use the same for 2G fuel. It is just like we extract rennet from the stomach of calves for making cheese. We later checked and found that research for 2G bio fuel is indeed based on enzymes from cow stomach.

So study about the enzymes and their role in our life is just DATA but when we use them for the solution of the problems then it is about IQ. Intelligence is the use of the data. I always say that Data is God and advise all to absorb as much data as they can. But data for me is not about the Birth place of Lord Buddha. I refer data about the name of a player, awardee, birth place, book writer etc. as “Spatial Data” and most of the time it is useless in the context of our life. But what Lord Buddha preached, his experience about the life and world is something which can’t even be valued. Because just the words of a person like Lord Buddha can transform the life of anyone just like he did for “Angulimal”. So the data about what our world is and how it behaves the way it behaves is most important for our life and I call this as “Essential Data” and the data which we can gather by comprehending the teachings of persons like Lord Buddha, Mahavir, Krishna etc. is “Transformational Data".

So when we have the data about how the phenomenon of the world behave then we can use that data for our use or for solving or for betterment of our life whether it is about electricity or medicines. Human first understood what electricity is and how it behaves and then with this data they had been able to produce the electricity on their own. This is IQ. IQ is more related to the use of knowledge rather than superficial knowledge. Use of knowledge requires deep understanding of the concept and factors affecting the behavior and outcomes which is very different from “surface scratching” teaching methods of our schools.

Our Brain has this amazing capability to create new insights, extract innovative ideas from the unknown in a flash but it happens when we have the data for processing in our mind, when our mind is filled with the essential data…data about how phenomenon works here in this world and most of the times our brain appears to create these insights on its own…in auto mode.

And the sad part is that our schools focus on imparting data only (that too “spatial data”) and very little effort is put on devising study material and method to promote and enhance the use of data by children for finding solutions of the problems. With our current low standards of imparting study in schools, most of the times they end at teaching “Essential data” as “Spatial Data” just like when they ask students to memorize the formula for calculating the area of a circle (πr²) and the derivation is never explained to them.

And if we can try to look beyond the apparent then we can see that the primary function of current education system is not to enhance the skills of students but to certify what they have-memory, intelligence etc. At present, a student is brilliant because he is brilliant on its own and there is no contribution from the school. Our schools just can’t enhance the intelligence of a poor child. There is no method and efforts to develop intelligence. So in essence, our schools are just certifying which student is brilliant,dumb or average.They are a testing platform only and there is no value addition from schools in the intellectual development of an average student. We all can remember how our poor school friend from 5^th standard was poor even in 10^th standards. I have seen people performing well in studies once they are out of school because after schools they were able to utilize their time much better on their problem areas but still the loss of most creative and productive period of childhood can never be replaced.

Our current education system can never create revolutionary innovators. Sometimes, Indian education system appears good due to individual brilliance stories but system itself doesn’t contribute much to create and develop brilliant brains. The contribution of our schools in creating and nurturing the brilliance is insignificant. These individuals could have written their destiny even in sheer darkness.

For the current sorry state of our education system is due to many reasons but surprisingly one of the reasons is- NCERT, the failure of NCERT in developing the qualitative aspects of education and content. There is big hue and cry every year about compulsory sourcing of NCERT textbooks by CBSE schools and it appears that only mandate of NCERT is to produce cheap textbooks. However books publication was never the mandate of NCERT. NCERT was set up in 1961 to assist and advise the Central and State governments on policies and programmes for qualitative improvement in school education. Its main focus areas were research related to school education and the publication of “model” textbooks. As we can see the mandate was “to publish Model books”. It was never of “Mass publication of books” as it is thought of.

However the government is using the tax payers' money to subsidize the paper cost which is used by the NCERT books and therefore being made cheaper. The government is subsidizing it to the end students by using the tax payers’ money. So, as we can see taxpayers are paying for the cheap books and it is not that they are producing it cheaply. That’s why I sometimes feel that it is better for NCERT to stick to its original mandate of research in improving the quality of school education rather than wasting time on publishing millions of books and wasting time on supply chain.

Excessive Useless study material and study time

When I was looking for a suitable school for my son in Nagpur I was shocked to see that all the schools were forcing excessive useless study material and excessive school timings on small children. How can a small child of 7 years afford to spend 7-8 hours in a controlled tiring environment in a school daily and then after that hope to enjoy their golden childhood. I have seen parents sending their children to tuition even when they already wasted 7-8 hours already in school. This is injustice and torture beyond imagination.

Due to long school hours a child is not being able to take food properly plus food always gets stale/cold during these long hours. After the poor child comes back home after putting 7-8 hours he is always very tired. This affects his playtime and sleeping pattern very badly as they are supposed to get up at 7 am which is not good for children as their body clock and sleep/rest pattern is different. Most of the children I have seen take school as some type of jail which they have to endure somehow and this is not good at all for the long term intellectual growth of a child.It is surprising that in spite of the regular intervention by high court still the schools are being allowed to play with the rules and the lives of small children.

This forcing of extra subjects by the school is the main cause of extended hours (or torture not study). Because even if we take 45 minutes for 3 subjects as prescribed by NCERT/CBSE the total study time will be 135 minutes plus 15 minutes assembly and another 1 hour for play and food break will make it approx. 250 minutes (4 hours) but now they are put to endure school for 7 long hours and this becomes 8-9 hours due to travelling times in larger cities.

A child learns and absorbs the world best when he is a free spirit without any stress or pressure. Class rooms are not the best way for this as a child learns by visuals and real life phenomenon not through empty words. So the need is to give them proper environment, free time in real life for the observation and visualization not trapped in the class rooms like prisoners.

We still have in our education system the wrong notion of “Population syndrome” where we perceived more people as good (for earning more income) but ended up being a highly populated country devoid of even most basic amenities. The same mentality we are following for child education thinking “more is better” while it is common sense that burden of books kills creativity, ingenuity, Natural flow of thinking and natural talent. Numerous studies have shown that the education standard is one of the true indicator (Other is health) of economic development in a country and it is sorry to see that India is lacking both.

So our schools need to throw away the herd like mentalities and try to bring in innovative models for imparting knowledge…schools should play the role of more of a medium (Channel) through which the students absorb the knowledge than a heavy burden which only forces students to struggle for walking straight on a tight rope with heavy burden on their heads.

PISA moment for India

A young man has the responsibility for his own action and life but a child is the responsibility of the parents, school and society and we try to fulfill this responsibility by putting them for long painful hours in school. In fact, this “More is good “ mentality has polluted our education system so much that India occupied 73th place among of 74 countries participating in PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test (the last one in which India participated).

PISA survey is conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)  to test education systems by comparing the test performance of 15-year-old pupils. Indian education planners were shocked at the poor standing and cited reasons like language problems of Indian students which was not even a face hiding excuse since many other non-English speaking nations like China emerged as winners. Besides, there is not much role of a language in Mathematics.

Students from Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and China (Hong Kong, Macao, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Jiangsu province) were among the top performers. Over 540,000 students, from 70 countries, participated in the tests. The two-hour test not only evaluates the cognitive skills of students in science, math, and reading, but also assesses their ability to solve problems in new and unfamiliar conditions (as I have explained earlier the IQ). The approach of PISA “reflects the fact that modern economies reward individuals not for what they know, but for what they can do with what they know.” All this implies creativity, free and natural thinking process, long rooted culture of understanding the problem and concept not just memorization and we know that our education system fails big time in inculcating and motivating these traits. Due to embarrassment India did not participated in the 2012 and 2015 survey. At present India is thinking of participating in 2020 PISA test and i think this apprehension is a tight slap on the face of our so called great educators who are basking in self glorification.

Success of innovative education system of Finland-An eye opener for India

Countries like Denmark and Finland have with their focus on creativity, innovation and continuous restructuring created an environment where children take schools a place of enjoyment and learning not as some type of Jail and this has resulted in the children of these countries achieving big in their life and these are some of the happiest countries in the world. Recently, the success of Finland in raising their education standards has made even the likes of USA to follow their approach. Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world. In PISA tests, Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000. Earlier world over, the education system of USA, Germany and France was considered the best but the success of Finland in PISA tests continuously shocked the entire globe.

The likes of China, Taiwan has done well but even in these countries children are being made to sit for long hours in schools. These countries are now finding that their children are unhealthy and devoid of energy due to excessive brain drain and long school hours. However Finland has achieved the success in education in much better and healthiest way. Finland has achieved this remarkable progress just in a span of 10 years.

In Finland they do the opposite-children are assigned minimum homework (half an hour only) and most of the school time is used for creative play outdoors. There are no regular exams/tests for evaluating the students in fact they have one test after the end of high school taken at the age of 16 which may be equal to our matriculation test. Unlike our great indian Educators they were first to realize that tests/exams make students and teachers to focus on the narrow syllabus and focus is just to pass the exam so this leaves minimum scope for learning, creativity and enjoyment. In Finland, there are no lists of top performing schools, students and teachers.

My son asks me how power plant produce electricity, how AC cools the room, how lemon grows on the tree in our apartment…..so just like every child he has a lot of question about “how the phenomenon works” but we want them to spend their time in watching aimlessly at class room blackboard for hours and absorb the common study content which tries to fit all the children with varying choices and passions into same box.

Our schools take all the children as a commodity and there is no focus on individualization. This fact when I brought in front of management of my son’s school they were looking at me aimlessly and I understood that they were incapable of understanding this. But in Finland teachers create their own tests to assess every child. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country while in India most of the people choose teaching when they do not get employment elsewhere or when they himself were average students (But indeed there are some brilliant teachers because exception is general). I have seen some of the dumbest (academically) persons working as school teachers and even head of school.

The main idea behind the education system in Finland is to provide same education to every child regardless of financial, family or geographical background and the aim was not to make children Job ready but on social equality. So there are no private schools and children are given healthy meals, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.  But most startling achievement is that the difference in the top preforming and low preforming students is lowest in Finland and similarly no other country has so little variation in results across schools. So as I was pointing out earlier that our schools have no value addition in the intelligence of students but Finland has proved that they can do it.  So Finland has proved that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

In Finland, schooling starts at the age of 7. I have seen Indian parents sending their kids to school at the age of 2-3 years which pains me. We sent our son to Pre-nursery school at the age of 4 that too for 2-3 times a week for some 2-3 hours just to play but no study. We sent him to school when he was 6. In Finland Science classes have only 16 students so that all can focus on practical experiments in detail. School timings are only for about 4 hours (which I want to see in India also and I failed to make our so called educators understand). Their school starts around 10 am as they also understand that early school timings inflict severe damage to the health of children.

The national curriculum is only broad guidelines and so teachers are required to use their creativity and innovation to devise the learning methods for each and every child individually. That’s the reason that some of the brilliant academic minds choose teaching as a profession in Finland and they are respected and enjoy the status just as doctors and lawyers. Finland publishes highest books every year and Finnish people are avid readers. Helsinki the capital of Finland was declared the city with the most honest people.

The focus on Finland on improving the quality of their education has begun to show results as in 2017 Finnish startups received highest venture capital by GDP share in Europe. They have most innovative startups like Solar Foods has developed a product named “solein”, which is an edible protein produced without any current agricultural systems and its environmental impact is ten to one hundred times lower than soy or meat. Another startup Sulapac has developed an award winning material from wood chips and natural binders to replace plastic. Then another startup Spinnova transforms cellulose into textile-ready fiber without dissolving processes or harmful chemicals, using 99% less water than the cotton value chain. Spinnova won Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Award. These are just few of the startups they are creating. Our Nokia is also a Finnish company.

Most important thing, Finland is a country which has forest products as major exports so one would think that they must have destroyed all of their forests like we are destroying. Now the fact, 74% of the area of Finland is covered by forests just like Bhutan which have in their constitution to have minimum 60% forests. In Europe, Finland is a "forest giant", there being over sixteen times more forest per capita than in European countries on average.  The amount of timber in their forests would make a 10-metre wide and 5-metre high wall around the globe. Finland has ensured this by growing more trees than they are cutting every time. This wisdom and care is possible because of the high education standards unlike India where we consider The Ganga river as holiest and our Mother but still pollutes it like gutter so can we say that our education system has made us more civilized, aware, full of wisdom and compassion? The answer we all know without even any need to study anything.

You all can check more interesting details about the success of Finland education system by googling it.

Finally a Homeschool for our Son 

There were many big and expensive schools in Nagpur but they were also suffering from the same disease-no understanding of education and children. So we were helpless and chose a school which looks like having some sanity. But their only sanity was that they never forced us to send our child to school daily as we started sending our child school every alternate day in order to give him time to recover and rest.

Our only hope was that may be he would be able to like the school which he did to some extent but the main issue was the excessive school timings and unnecessary study of GK, Grammar and EVS which was total wastage of time for a 1^st standard student. We realized that he was always very tired in the evening, lack of energy, disorientation, irritation, frequent stomach problem and Nausea. This I have seen with almost every child.

So we decided that all this torture is not good for our child and I met/wrote to the school principle many times and explained the situation and the fact that they are breaking the rules of CBSE/Court/NCERT by forcing these extra books and extra school hours. But they were limited by their wisdom (and IQ level). This is not the story of that particular school….everywhere is the same situation…all over India. I asked them what is the purpose of teaching these small kids the English grammar? What is the usefulness of teaching them about the vowels and consonants? I even challenged them that even their teachers do not understand the concept behind Vowels.

We do job for 8 hours a day and time for us moves very fast. As we can see that years are passing like months once we cross 30-35. But time for a child moves very slow…extremely slow. We all can remember our life at school and college and those 10 years (until graduation) seems like 50 years to us if we compare the current speed of movement of our time. There are some strange theories which say that this perception of time (moving fast or slow) has its roots linked with the ratio of time interval to the total life span we have been alive. Like for a 10 year old young boy, one year is a long period of time since one year is 10% of his total life so far. But for a 50 year old this one year is just 2% of his total life. So no doubt we can see here that 10% is more than 2% I explained this to the principal that 7 hour for a child are equal to some 20 hours of ours and this is what Einstein’s theory of relativity is all about and as a teacher they can better understand this but they could never as they suffered from intellectual myopia.

Once the school principal told my wife that we needed to up the ante for our son as he was lagging behind in studies. But these great educators could not see that first of all they failed to do something when they were fully aware of the problems our son was facing. They were breaking the rules of court/CBSE and could never muster the courage to answer any of my emails about these issues because in essence they lacked the intellect to comprehend these intricacies of human mind and growth. They could not gather the courage to accept that all these unnecessary books, long school timings are just a ploy to fetch higher school feel from parents..who will pay them such hefty fees if not for these long hours and number of books. They are doing this injustice to small children and ruining their golden period of learning with all sorts of garbage. How? Because their customers-the parents are not aware of anything...they are dead illiterate when the issue is to choose quality over quantity.

Our son loves drawing and draws the shapes with great accuracy and drawing is just like writing alphabets or words because these alphabets are nothing more than drawing shapes…as one can see “O” is a circle…”A” is a triangle. So we promoted our son to drawing and he could learn writing alphabets very easily without much effort on our part. Our son is very fond of things like Trains, Air conditioners, cranes, road rollers etc. and he likes writing the names of various AC’s like Onida, Samsung, Panasonic and he memorize these words without much effort when he was 6. So I tried explaining this to the school that “A” for Apple is not the only way to teach. “S” for Samsung conveys the same idea…for him “S” means Samsung or Shatabadi express. The purpose of “A” for Apple is not to teach him about the Apple but to make a child aware of the Sign (A) and related things because apple is not the only word to start with “A”…there is Ant…there are thousands. So no teacher can say that “S” only means Sun or Strawberry.

I still see parents putting their children to pre-school etc. at the age of 2-3. Actually early schools were discovered when both husband and wife used to work in the early dawn of industrialization and these pre-schools were required to take care of children. But there is no such situation now. Even when mother is a housewife and is well educated they still send their child to school at very tender age of 2-3 years and there is great risk to their mental health because 8 out of 10 children feel like in foreign territory and remain fearful. They yearn for home and mother continuously and this dis-orientation of mind is very dangerous.

These days we see so many children suffering from eye disease and they have to use spectacles. Now doctors have realized and confirmed that this is due to reduced exposure to sun light and focus of the children on near sight objects and they use their eyes to see far sight objects very less. This happens as they spend most of their times indoors in schools, then indoors at home and tuition and then TV and mobile phones. So this makes their eyes to suppress the growth of eye ball resulting into Myopia. They have listed sun light as the best remedy and prevention for this. This has taken the form of epidemic in countries like China where they have put excessive pressure for academic performance. Even in China the problem is severe in cities not in villages where the focus on education is still far less.

So left with no other option, we thought and finally decided to teach our son at home. There are some innovative alternate schools in India and some intelligent fellows are trying to teach students in a better engaged and joyful way where learning is a play but we could not find any such school in Nagpur otherwise that could be an option. So these days our son is living a happy and relaxed life. I am a chartered accountant and my wife is a merit holder in Masters in geography and I feel our son could not find better teachers. These days so many parents are becoming aware of the uselessness of our school education system and Homeschooling is fast catching the imagination of many parents in India. In fact, this is the highest growing education system in USA.

Even Government recognizes the value of homeschooling in india and recently Maharashtra Government launched Open SSC Board for homeschool students under which homeschool children can give exams for 5th std at the age of 10, for 8th Std at the age of 13 and for 10th Std at the age of 15. And if by the grace of God we could find any school imparting engaged and torture free learning then we'll put our son into that school...so the search is still on.


Not to Bring school at home while Home-schooling

As our son is very fond of Cranes, Trains, Power plants, cars etc. so we bought as many toys for him as much we can and he has large collection of toys on which he uses his creativity to make structures and build stories and narrate those to us. These days he is a free and relaxed soul and taking his interests in various activities like martial arts etc. For building his interest i have built my own gym at home so that he can see me doing gym and can relate himself. Most of his study time now is focused on "how" of this universe like how the things he likes works like he asked about goods train and we explained the same to him in detail-like we need transportation for carrying food, coal, cement etc...giving him the example of Chips (which he loves) which are produced in Gujarat but delivered to Nagpur in Trucks and now he explains the meaning of “Distribution” to others. He goes to see a nearby power plant almost 2-3 times in a week where he stands for half an hour watching and asking questions on its working. For us this is his schooling…much near to reality and involved.

So while home schooling we have tried not to bring "school at home". So we are not following just the regular textbooks for his study because as i have explained earlier most of the times they are just one dimensional. So we are exposing him to all sorts of phenomenon of the world so that he gets the exposure to various things of life/world and we are just watching him from the edge to see what can be his motivation for his future course of action in life. That motivation can be science, space, medicine, sports, art, construction etc. So we try to expose him to variety of Data in a relaxed and enjoyable manner. Like, he loves his mother the most and one day he told me that he was very worried that one day his mother would also get old. So seeing his interest, I tried to explain him the role of DNA/Genes in controlling and directing our bodies and told him that he could make his mother forever young if he could learn how to control the genes responsible for old age. He got really interested and I showed him the diagrams of DNA and how such vast amounts of data is stored in every cell of our body. Actually, if we can see at this age he can’t understand all these to the core but here the focus is to check and develop his interests. When we love something…have passion for something then learning becomes a play not a burden.

I have a small Gym at home and he sees me doing gym and he also loves physical activities the most whether it is running, cycling, wall climbing etc. but now after seeing me in the gym he likes doing push-ups and barbell curls. He can standstill between two doors on the sheer strength of his arms. So, we explained him the role of nutrition in the growth of our bodies and now he understands the role of Protein (in muscle building), carbs, fat and Vitamins in our bodies. He understands the danger of hydrogenated vegetable oils used in processed foods like chips etc. and he has left taking cold drinks, Frooti, most of the junk foods. He uses these only occasionally now. For developing his reading skills, we encourage him to use real life examples like reading the ingredients of the Chips bag. He can read, spell and write long and complex words like Palmolien, hydrogenated vegetable oils. For language & reading, we encourage him to imagine/create his own stories and while he narrates his stories we type the same for him. So he tells stories about how he and Doraeman save a child in a train accident. Then we make him read the story and as he has created it so he reads and understands words very easily.

But here the biggest difference if one can see is-He loves and enjoys reading and studying this way…for him this is not stress of education but a fun activity…and this is the only and best way to learn things and this joyful learning is the thing which keeps us motivated and full of life and energy even when we are old. Learning is not a phase but a vision. But no school in India understand this way of teaching as for them children are commodity and they impose only one learning method on everyone.

As one can see here there is no limit on learning. He can learn what he loves/likes or wants to know. and it is not confined to the borders defined by books and this really surprise me sometimes why most of the parents can't see the narrow range of school books. Our son just like other children wants to know how it rains, how trains operate, wants to play as long as he wants…but our schools forces them to not to ask anything beyond books and instead of playing watching real world they should sit in a narrow dark classroom watching and listening in which he is not interested at all.

School- a Partner in understanding and choosing the way of Life

I have always believed that we are here as part of our journey and this is not our first life. Because if we can see then we can realize that we are born with some of the behavior aspects of our persona like bravery, kindness, fear, will power…we were like this since our birth and we do not seem to done something in this life to acquire these attributes. We and our siblings are part of the same family…raised in the same environment…but yet we are all very different by nature, have different views, aspirations…why? Because we are all just continuing our journey from where we have left the same in our last attempt. Some children learn the music at very early age, some understands complex studies, some demonstrates amazing memory…these are all signs that we are starting the journey from where we have left last time in our last life.

So the most important thing in raising the children is to understand their path, their inclinations, their aspirations and creativeness through which they will express themselves to this world. To understand their path we need to observe them with open mind and not to impose our useless notions onto them. Parents do not know how many brilliant artists, scientists, musicians they have killed. Creativity is the biggest worship of this life and its only purpose…creativity enable us to transcend the realm of mind and comprehend and absorb the real essence of this life which fulfill our purpose of being here and prepares for the next much higher layer of life.

No child likes the school. The happy faces we see in schools do not enjoy the learning they were getting from school and they are happy because of other reasons like friends or play time. Also most of them after being forced into this daily accept this as part of their life but this also ensures the end of learning and purpose of life. Parents think that sad children in school are natural because they were like them in their childhood also but if they have any wisdom then they can very easily see that even their life was centered around job and career and they never enjoyed and relish what is real life…the flowers were never blossomed…they could never sing the song for which they have come to this world…and one day they will left unmanifested, unexpressed, unpronounced and unsatisfied. But they think that eating tasty food, gossiping, watching movies, having a car and house is the only aim of life and they feel that only this much fulfillment is possible in this life and our world (Tier-3 level). They can never understand what it feels like to create something…anything…music, a song, a story, an idea, a scientific discovery, spiritualism, occult…there is so much beyond our obvious world and so much to achieve and feel the bliss of having this beautiful time here until our death.

Death is inevitable yet all our efforts in our life are centered towards our survival only…very few have the strength to live out and put efforts for their dreams. Our sages like Vivekananda try hard to make us believe that what we are valuing as life is just worthless. They cry but we even go to them to get blessings to fulfill our worldly desires. I have heard many such stories where an enlightened person has said that his biggest sorrow is his incapability to make other people believe that our life has much superior purpose and structure. Once one of my friend remarked that it is due to death that life and all our efforts/hard work looks nonsense and foolish as at the end there is only this painful death. But i told him that may be we are taking and seeing it this way because reality may be that the ultimate aim of our life/efforts is just to get READY for this most important EVENT we call DEATH because there appears nothing much worth of this life...it appears and is low grade. So maybe we should think of welcoming this Death with hope rather than despair. May be Death is the only ultimate “Test” of our life but most of us passes the school test and due to passing this useless test we fail miserably in the ultimate Death test.