To school at 4 - the right step!

I was extremely delighted to see that the government is seriously mulling over raising the school entrance age of children to four, from the existing three, so that a child sits in class one, only on attaining six years of age. The minister for Human Resource Development, had called a meeting of the concerned ministers, drawn from all the states, in Delhi last week where the idea was mooted and my opinion is, that, it’s a step in the right direction (though three states viz. Kerala, UP and West Bengal went unrepresented, playing petty politics as usual, I’m sure that they too would eventually warm up to this well conceived idea).
What we see these days is the sad plight of children being sent to daycares, crèches and pre-schools, literally from their cradles so that their parents can take up jobs to bring in increased income to the family. The results are disastrous for everyone to see – the kids are brought up by untrained people, who are a completely harried lot, as they’re exposed to the tantrums thrown up by the children and hence do not hesitate to use any means to control difficult behavioural patterns and unwittingly in the process, inflict psychological scars on the children. And another sad consequence of this trend is that the kids lose their childlike innocence quite early and they’re made to run the race of life when many of them are woefully unequipped to take on the mad scramble! They become more and more like robots and I cringe when I hear children mouth dialogues/conversational pieces much beyond their age. For the children’s sake, my appeal to all parents would be, ‘please let them be what they are and do not force the pace on them.’Furthermore, to bring about a revolutionary change, education should be a continuously enthralling experience, where the teacher – student dialogue is an ongoing process with the rote system completely shunned and teaching, as a profession, given its pride of place as teachers mould the country’s future.