It was the title of my Business Management course presentation during 3rd year of college. It focused on how schools and society, together, are killing creativity.
I just had a thought that the most common hobby among kids is to “Dance”. Why? Probably because parents don’t [want to] spend on other hobbies much. Kids can learn to dance on television, and they don’t have to go outside for that. Parents being overprotective is not better for kids, and the impact is not yet clearly visible to many people.
Kids compelled to grow in a particular predetermined environment can’t blossom as much as they can in a free atmosphere. The positives and negatives of this are known to almost everyone thus it doesn’t need any explanation. The thing is what the impacts are. This constrained growth has not taught kids to accept failures. They become depress and get anxious when they fail. Kids expected to get full marks are doing well in that but they don’t know anything else. So if they’ll get their hands on anything else later, they won’t have the confidence of even trying out.
Well, these overprotective parents do what is best according to them. Their kids should focus on one thing, and they should excel at the same. They don’t understand diversity. They are blind to some extent to see what their kids need. Mostly orthodox, they can’t accept new changes. That’s okay. Even Newton’s first law states that if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by a Force. All we need is a little force.
Adults are often called out for opposing their parents or for questioning them. As I heard someone once saying that “Kids only cut the roots of their parents”. In response to which I wanted to reply, “Even parents do the same in many ways”, but neither the situation was appropriate, nor I expected them to understand my point. Also, we are not supposed to counter elders. See how we are taught not to question.
Standup comic Abhishek Upmanyu has a standup video where he said that he has never got a reasonable answer from elders about why we should respect them. In short, we should do it to maintain the social hierarchy that is necessary for society/organization/family/country to function in the best possible way. We can’t manage a large organization without a hierarchy. Chinese communist regime, Military and Administration of a country are good examples of that. You can use force or reinforcement in a hierarchical system which in general gives good results.
Another not very well answered question is that we are not told why we need to go to college. I also discussed a bit about it in recent blogs. If we start from point zero, then consider a man in the stone age. He found some things and learnt some through experience. This knowledge has to be transferred to generations to come. So they kept teaching it to kids, and this was working well. Later at some stage, we needed professionals for some things. People who were good at certain things started training for the same. That led to formal training in the specific field. Then came the concept of schools, then universities and what we see today. We have come a long way.
But in the process of it, we forgot why do we need it in the first place? Probably because throughout history, those who had education/training did better than others in specific fields. Let us consider some competition of wrestling or any other game. Assume that two villages had a championship of wrestling. The village which won felt proud of their candidate. His family was proud that their kid managed to win. Later some other families wanted to take pride in their home, so they also sent their kids for training. Later this spread to all the other things. Especially education, where we can see that quite clearly.
Education has given us miracles, specifically in the past 500 years. From some good governing systems to a healthy and secure lifestyle, even technology education has given us all. Who would have thought that we would progress like this? Well, everyone wants to be a part of this progressing world somehow. That’s why we need education. To keep progressing we need better people who are articulate and best at what they do. To have such people we need good schools and universities. There is no point in merely mediocre education. To people at the bottom of the social hierarchy, it means something but if we continue to provide mediocre education to most people, then we will have a large portion of the population with average knowledge. We wouldn’t know what to do and where to utilize such masses.
A person should strive to best at what he does. A kid can never know what he likes unless he gets introduced to a certain number of options. You can certainly tell what a kid is not good at but not what he can’t excel at. We don’t believe in answering the questions. Even if we sometimes want to answer but then we don’t feel comfortable answering. Best, with the least effort, we can do is to learn to accept that we don’t know. A guardian or a teacher, when asked something, instead of scolding the kid, should be able to accept that they don’t know the answer. Either they will check it and answer later or the kid can go to a particular person or source to know more about the same.
See how simple is that. We all are killers. We are killing the possibility of growth in the life of a human being, be it ours or a kid’s. In case you want to atone for your sins, just answer the questions you are asked by a kid next time or accept that you don’t know. Also, don’t kill the possibilities of growth within you or in anyone else. That would be enough.
Also if you don’t change and think that this is rubbish, then you need to open your eyes to see thousands of kids who were academically gifted as per your standards but are now anxious adults who have unfulfilled wishes, relinquished hobbies and self-hatred whenever they fail.
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