Danish Khatana
Education is widely regarded as indispensible for the physical, mental, moral and spiritual growth of an individual as it shapes and modifies the conduct of an individual in various facets of life. Knowledge empowers us and nothing is more powerful than knowing oneself, one’s potentialities, weaknesses and strengths. One should know what holds one back and what drives one forward. Ultimately, it is upon us how we can improve ourself to make ourselves better.
What Education Really means?
Education is the process or art of imparting skills and judgement. It is a systematic process through which we can acquire knowledge, skills, experience and attitude. It makes an individual cultured, refined and civilized. However, being educated is not to have degrees in hand but to distinguish between right and wrong, inculcate societal values and cultivate a sense of justice. Thus, being educated means implementing your learning into practice in daily life. Being educated means being respectful to others, loyal towards one’s work and towards one’s own country and all fellow human beings.
Enlightenment and Education
Science can give us comforts and luxuries but we are still restless, and sometimes even feel worthless and helpless too. The real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance. There is nothing more enlightening than knowing yourself, yours weaknesses and strengths. To improve oneself, one needs to do self introspection and SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, about what holds one back and drives one forward. Education is a method or an instrument which converts an ordinary human being into a fully functional and meaningful person through the medium of knowledge. It is necessary to fulfill our responsibility towards new generation to shape our minds towards making contribution to the society and the nation.
Enlightenment, on the other hand, is the attainment of maturity in our behavior, actions and thoughts to become a fully functional human being to participate in important human endeavors beyond immediate self. It imparts the sense of responsibility to an educator to see what knowledge and how is it imparted to the students so that in the entire learning process, they turn into a better human being, well informed and good citizens. Thus, the difference between education and enlightenment is indeed a thin one, but yet very much significant.
Educating the Parents
Care giving to ones offspring is a basic characteristic of all mammals, especially the human beings who require the longest period for maturation, of which learning forms a major part. Lots of care, warmth and equal treatment is crucial, before they become self-sufficient. All children deserve equal nutrition, protection, and development. Furthermore, there shall be provision of quality inputs including social care, health care, nutrition, joyful learning experiences in protective and enabling environment. As parenthood is regarded as crisis by many because it necessitates major changes in attitude, values and roles, so parenting can be seen as bringing a unique mixture of stress and joy.
During childhood, parents are the primary care giver to build resilience in a child. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from a difficult experience. Infact, positive parenting moderates the effects of multiple risk factors.
The parents might possibly provide a lot of emotional support to their children, to sail smoothly through their educational careers in particular as well as journey of life in general, with enhanced amount of self confidence. As a result, Children have the possibility to grow up to be more mature than the adults who raised them up in the first place. However, sensible expectations allow parents and children to relax, thus allowing a child’s natural progression to maturity.
Thus, arises the need for parents to be informed about ways in which they can best rear their children so that by their adolescence, they might reach their highest level of achievement.
Parents are of two types – Authoritative and Authoritarian. Authoritative parents being high in acceptance, involvement, responsiveness, patience and sensitivity to their child’s needs, succeed in establishing an emotionally fulfilling parent-child relationship. As they allow the child to make own critical decisions, this willingness to accommodate the child’s perspective increases the chances that the child will listen to them in situations where compliance is vital. On the other hand, are the Authoritarian parents who are very much low in acceptance and involvement. Usually, they are cold and callous to their child’s opinion, frequently ridiculing their child by mocking and putting them down. As a result they focus heavily on control of their child’s behaviour. They do so coercively, by commanding and criticizing. They tend to make decisions on behalf of their children and expect them to accept their decisions, unquestionably. This often makes the children quite unhappy and anxious. Children who are brought up in such authoritarian ways tend to develop an attitude that severely restricts their creativity and curiosity. They develop the attitude of resentment. Children suffer from anxiety and various kinds of stress disorders relating to exam fear. As a matter of fact , India has one of the world’s highest suicides rates for youth aged between 15 to 29. Parents, shall as a necessity take steps to reduce their fear and anxiety by continuously asking them if they are stressed. Therefore, Parents should be authoritative not authoritarian in their parenting style. Proper and good communication is indeed the key to effective and positive parenting. Parents always want the dream profession for their children, however a more sensible approach, would enable them a larger purpose that defines the course that their career would take. Emotional intelligence and communication are very much critical in this.
Conclusion
In order to conclude, I would say that our Education system should be such that it should prepare an individual to become vibrant socially, mentally, morally as well as ethically. It should focus on the policies that could make an individual aware of his or her obligation towards the society. It should create awareness in the society to ensure that all the schools, colleges and universities do make it a point to conduct counselling sessions for the parents as well as the educators. These sessions shall in particular focus upon the subjects of positive parenting, personality development, emotional intelligence and appropriate methodology of teaching.
(The author is Educator at Unacademy)
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