Shree: Who’s thinking?!

 

Shree: Who’s thinking?!

We start with the notion that kids always (should) receive a positive feedback regarding their actions. This has reference with a previous piece of article stating the belief that in Vancouver people ought to “always put up a smiling face” (as if no other emotion should exist!). Recent approaches in academics, wherever i am involved stress a fact that intensity of critical comments to the students should substantially be curtailed, since there would occur a tendency of “backlash” from parents (who seem to be regarded as the “clients” of the academic industry) and the guide himself/herself would be “held responsible” for giving miserable marks to the students and failing them! With so much of pressures to be tackled, it is understandable that the conversation between the teacher and the student becomes muddier, ambiguous, politically motivated displaying all shades of bright (or optimistic if you will) colours but far from the reality to “call a space a spade”.

This has deeper origins – in mindscape and it all starts probably at a very young age of hyper busyness of our lives, stress of producing immense amount of some output, constant evaluation, pushing the students to “do some work”, motivating them and so on. There were years when the idea of constant evaluation was celebrated over the dreaded semester exams and if that didn’t suffice, the concept of examination itself was junked! In retrospect i think it is a combination of factors concerning speed, production, information overload, lack of focus on the pupil’s part, quantum of students to be passed and rise in the cost of living, too much uncertainty to repeat an academic year and demand from parents to “get ahead” in life!

But the system which makes us work for a living is also some kind of hard boiled egg – only acknowledging a very limited perspective of production cycle, speed and logical thinking. This has very hard repercussions on all aspects of emotions, organic living and the ability of the person to define one’s nature of livelihood. All get sabotaged.

Also are the effects of too much premium on the value of “individualism and privacy” at the cost of sharing and negotiating and discussing and mutual learning. The key word used nowadays is “collaboration” which is a powder coated word used to conceal snobbish behaviour according to me. Life is hard, with all its complexity, variety of people, their tendencies, factors of age, ability and so on. Tolerance and empathy develop by exposing kids to this very hard environment. But the march towards refinement, planning, curtailing of diversity, imposing uniformity and predictability has disastrous effects on the mindscape – if all people end up “thinking alike”; one is actually endangering the purpose of thinking in the first place and creativity next! No thinking will be left for a perfectly uniform mindscape of a society and what will be experienced is a “numbness beyond any words to describe” – a kind of brain dead state! Or in other words – apathy at its best and annihilation of mindscape itself.  That is where we are heading!

Hari Om.