Teach & Learn

My daughters’ school had organized a workshop for kids to learn traffic rules at school. Incidentally, it was a friend's birthday on the same day. Parents were dropping the children who were invited, all chirpy and excited, when suddenly one of the kids noticed the parent jumping the red light. She yelled to her father — the teacher had taught today itself that red means stop! The proud owner of the INR 1+ CR vehicle, laughed it off saying, “we were already late, and anyway traffic lights were still yellow”. The child didn't understand back then. But the adult she has become today does. We experience children being reprimanded to put their phones down at the table in restaurants, while the parent scrolls away merrily with a very lame excuse. Children are advised lying is a sin at tea time. And just before dinner they hear the parent telling a relative or a friend on the phone "we'd love to come but we have a family thing" that day while the real plan is absolutely zilch! The lesson isn't in the rulebook. It's in the rerun. Children are observing everything happening, grasping every tiny detail, stocking it up like special birthday gifts in the backroom of our head. And just like gifts, they open them alone, so they don't have to share it with anyone. What our kids don’t realize as they grow up, is that every other friend of theirs has an equally big idiot parent like us, gifting them such stupid life learnings! Slight difference arises when few of us choose to invite friends and share the misery.

There are some observations that we toil with for a bit, not knowing what to do, much like that photo frame or the bedsheet-cushion cover combo set gifted at the wedding. We shove them half-wrapped onto the top kitchen shelf or above the atleast almirah in the house. We wait for it to be re-gifted at the next invite that comes along. We are parents who tell our kids to be true friends and never share someone’s secrets, while taking screenshots of exchanges of private messages with a colleague and forward to another group chat saying, "just sharing that I wasn’t kidding”. The kid fidgets with the observation, keeps it away for a bit, only to re-gift it later at someone’s expense. We all get the same experience. The difference is who broke the chain. Who kept the bedsheet and used up the cushion covers. Who decided to stop and not forward the same message any further.

We all grow up. We all age. We do not mature. We spend our whole lives waiting for the one big leap — the one massive concept that will make us famous, popular or rich! Life doesn't hand out equal opportunities. What it does hand out are small chances, tiny decisions that, done right, add up to something huge. e.g., because I was running late I cut someone off at the light or someone cut mem doesn’t really matter. We are getting late, remember. But both of us get down to argue for the next 14 minutes, making is even more late! Instead of a simple "my bad, sorry, let’s move on", we built an entire traffic jam of office-goers with rippling effect of next 45 minutes. Could be the same parent above —the child has quietly learnt that inconveniencing people is perfectly OK as long as you complain about it loudly enough.

We all know parents who are furious like Sabu when their child gets 92% and not 95%. However, her/his Linkedin posts say "we should celebrate effort over outcome." The child may never see that caption. What the child will remember is the parent’s face looking at the report card. Similar confusion is gifted to the child in the building WhatsApp group – a random message gets a sarcastic reply. Which gets a worse one as a response. Screenshots ammunition is built & sprayed across for the next 3 hours - just so “everyone should know what kind of person X or Y is”. Meanwhile, the same parent is heard advising the child, “beta, there is absolutely no need to respond to bullies. Just ignore and walk away”. In a few days, the kid isn't confused anymore about the rule. The kid is unsure, why the rule apparently doesn't apply once you're old enough to have a smartphone.

We all jump yellow lights. We all get caught just when it turns red. And now, we're all in the jam that we built and never owned up to. A small brain in the backseat takes notes, nonetheless. Wrong notes forever.  Maturity was never about glamorous extravaganzas, but small, boring, mundane things well — when no one's watching, especially, human being at an impressionable age. Education tries to ensure we learn well enough to understand some things and understand well enough to not learn certain things. It's not always about action. It's also about staying aware to ignore the action, whenever one is wrong. Probably, why literacy doesn’t matter, education does, literally.

-Q