There is a new post going around facebook. One that says "I'm from the 1990s, the last sane generation blah blah blah, played on the road, could live without my mobile and computer..." and a lot of other such stuff.
True, I am proud to have known the awesome fun in playing on piles of sand, chucking stones at dogs and running away, climbing trees and going back home with bloody knees and wide grins. Something that today's cuckolded generation might not do. We have all grown up listening to amazing stories of our grandparents doing apparently superhuman feats and listen with awe as they described the distances they used to walk to school and other places. How many nights have ended with these stories!
When I look back on my first 10 years of existence, I have my fair share of stories of those times to pass on. And most of these stories start off with me going out to play at 8 in the morning during summer holidays and coming home tired and hungry in the evening. Even during school, playtime was attended with utmost regularity.
I fear that this will not be the case in the near future.
I heard recently that BASE, (yes our very own BASE) is now conducting classes for 5th and 6th standard kids! AIEEE and IIT coaching makes sense, FIIT a little less sense but palatable. But conducting tuition classes for 4th standard kids amounts to child torture.
The timings are weekdays, at 5 in the evening.
Is this some kind of practical joke? How can parents subject their kids to such environments when they have to play and learn from experiences outside. They will all face a time when they have to study and academics gains prominence, but 5th standard is not that time!
What next? I wouldn't be surprised to see billboards saying "Start your child's education with BASE", Preschool for toddlers! (with a grinning pic of HSN).
Why is there such a big fuss being made about education? Being street smart is what they learn on the street, not as a chapter in personality development in engineering.
Give kids back their freedom.
It will certainly be a sorry day when there are kids who look down upon the idea of evening playtime (spent OUTSIDE the house).
Let us hope that we never see such a day.
Tuition classes for 5th std kids?!! WTF.
Someone go knock some sense into HSN
Ciao
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It isn't HSN that is the problem, not necessarily. Have a look at Chennai, where IIT coaching from 5th standard gets some big gasps from chatty housewives; not because its too early, but because its too late. In the IIT coaching scene, BASE and Bangalore in general is considered a "bachcha", simply because it is too flexible and does not torture its students like the others. Criminal irony, but true.
ReplyDeleteI'm not always so critical of BASE. As far as entrance tests are concerned, BASE did a fair job on me. I don't think I would have done well in them if I wasn't in BASE.
ReplyDeleteThat's one side of the story.
Just yesterday, I sat in a thermodynamics class, listening to the teacher speak about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I came home and just casually opened the foreign author book. It was engrossing, and I read on. I discovered this new amazing concept called Entropy. It generalizes all factors into one single function. It is brilliant. Not that it isn't complicated; its so complicated that even established teachers have a hard time explaining (and probably understanding) it. I don't claim to have understood it fully, but I sat all through dinner and my night time TV session, just thinking about small molecules arranged in rows, marching into regions of faster molecules, thinking of ways to subvert the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The term "entropy" isn't new to most of us. We read about entropy in detail during our IIT classes. But I don't think most of us actually "discovered" what Entropy is. To be frank, the whole of my Basic Thermodynamics and Applied Thermodynamics portions combined is still belittled by the IIT-JEE portions.
Never once in my two years at BASE, have I stopped to wonder what exactly the concepts mean; not that I didn't want to, I wanted to , so badly; but I never found the time. The BASE teachers were good, in fact some of them are the best teachers I ever found. Speaking from a learner's point of view, those two years were a big waste. If there weren't so many useless things to study, then I could have as well learnt what Entropy was in the 12th standard itself. Knowledge is what is important. Just plain information isn't.
I have no qualms about the quality of education that BASE provides or the fact that they have been really helpful in my second pu. As a 12th std student, BASE is like a bitter ayurvedic syrup. Tough to swallow, but does you a world of good.
ReplyDeleteHowever, tutions for 5th standard students is something i cannnot accept. While it is true that JEE requires extensive preparation, piling up work on a 5th standard kid when he neither understands nor cares for JEE is a waste of the kids' time.