Learning A Joyful Experience A Daily Manual for Pre School Teachers and Parents (Volume-1)

Foreword

We are in a knowledge society, which is making increasing demands on knowledge as a resource for living. Today our economy is becoming increasingly knowledge-based. Learning to learn, remaining a learner and learning to apply to concrete situations will increasingly make many new demands on the future schools.

Children love learning and are extremely good at it. The need to learn is a natural gift to humans. But it is particularly true for children, especially at an early age, when they begin to explore the world around them. Therefore we do not have to motivate children to learn. They do it naturally. While most adults will withdraw from an invitation to try and learn to play an instrument they have not touched or to learn a new task, most children will happily take to it. Take them to the learning situation, listen to them respectfully and get out of their way. Trust them to learn.

Why then do so many children fail? They fail because they are afraid, bored and confused. They are afraid of failing, of disappointing, of displeasing the adults, bored because of the things they are given and told to do are often so trivial and of no interest to them; confused because most of the torrent of words that they hear make no sense to them.

Many children feel suppressed, oppressed and put down. There is little scope for the exercise of responsible freedom. So, they hold back the most intelligent and creative parts of their minds away from the school scene. Provide them a more supportive learning climate and they will do very well. But teachers often assume that there is nothing good in children except what we teachers (or parents) have put in them.

The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do but how we behave when we don’t know what to do. Intelligent adults  and intelligent  students can be recognized by the following characteristics: they are curious about reality and want to get in touch with it and get involved with it; they like to experiment; they are  patient; they are willing to go ahead on the basis of incomplete understanding and information; they will take risks.  As the children grow up, what happens to this extraordinary capacity for learning and for intellectual growth? It is often destroyed by the process we call education. We destroy them by what we do or coerce them to do. We ruin their capability by making them afraid: afraid of not doing what we adults want; afraid of not pleasing us adults, afraid of making mistakes; afraid of failing, afraid of being wrong afraid, afraid, afraid, afraid… Thus we make them afraid to gamble, experiment, and take the difficult and the less travelled paths. Even if they don’t get it from us, they come from their homes with these traits and we build on them and use them to our advantage and for our purposes.