Children are abused in many ways in our country. They are tortured to death, punished in workplaces, harassed at home and in school, bullied by elders, trafficked, raped, maimed and murdered for some people's petty and criminal interests. But suppose all these ways of child abuse can be eliminated tomorrow, yet child abuse will not completely go away from our country.
Because, there is another form of child abuse in our education system which is not visible to mortal eyes but strongly existent. This form of child abuse is unique in countries like ours where either the state has left a large part of the education system into private care and/or the public system is abused for the benefit of unscrupulous profiteers.
Unnecessary and excess books in our schools are a means of abusing our children in the name of good, quality education. Here school children are always overloaded with books. Schools select many books besides the government-approved textbooks and compel students to buy these.
The objective of such selection of extra books is not so much for improvement of education as for financial benefits of the school authority. There are some underhand dealings between the school authority and the publishers. In villages where schools don't select any extra books besides the textbooks, teachers compel students to buy guide/notebooks, whereas the government has been trying to eliminate all guidebooks from our school system. Compelling happens in the way of harassing learners in case of their failure to buy the extra books dictated by teachers.
Last year the high court prohibited the carrying of schoolbags that weigh more than ten percent of children's body weight. The year before last year the Bombay High Court gave such a direction for school children in India. The problem is really widespread in this region. Children's backs are bent down under the weight of too may books in their schoolbags.
The physical impairment it causes is enormous, which has prompted the high court to take this decision against heavy schoolbags. Yet, the high court has only dealt with the physical side of the problem caused by schoolbags whereas the root of the problem lies deeper than this.
The problem is not confined to merely breaking the backs of children under the weight of books. The weight of schoolbags can be kept low without reducing the number of books children are forced to study. The question of force comes here because the selection of the extra books by the school authority is not done with the view of reading for pleasure.
Again, there are legitimate questions about the quality of these books. Moreover, the socio-political ideology some of these extra books promote might not be consistent with the ideology of the state, for which the process of building a harmonious society with liberal views based on collective interests instead of conflicting personal gains may be seriously hampered.
Now, don't we want our children to learn more to become competent in this global age? Of course, we do. Still, we must not want to make each of our children into Google or a box of data. We have to focus on developing their minds with positive social feelings. If they do not learn to read for plaesure also, besides the textbooks approved by the state, they will be hateful against reading in future, which truly happens in our country.
As soon as the exam and/or the student life is over, many of our boys and girls sever connection with books for ever. The general idea in our country is books are only for students who need to pass exams in order to get some profitable job, not for those who have finished their student life. According to this view, only the books from where questions come in exams are readable, pathyapustok, no other is worth reading, and so opathya. Too many books and too much pressure to memorise these lead students and people to this very sad, unhealthy view.
Reading of books selected in school, college or university and learning these by rote occupies most of the time of our children and thus deprives them of their childhood. Too many exams in our education institutes have made the situation worse.
Most of our children, especially those who are of the poor background, have little time to spend in sports, creative activities like music, theatre, etc., and in reading books of the outside, bairer boi or opathyapustok. Day and night they read books only to make good results in exams and always hope for the days when they can throw away this heavy load from their minds and backs bent to the point of breaking.
Reading too many books and preparation for exams have ill consequences in relation among members of a family, too. There are instances in our country of exchanging hot words between husband and wife over their child's study; when one parent insists on their child sitting at the table with the textbook till midnight, the other vehemently opposes it for the sake of the mental wellbeing of the child.
Children lose their childhood in the struggle to satisfy their parents' demand for making brilliant results in the exam. Generally, life of a family in urban areas has turned into running from home to coaching centres to private tutors to school/college and back to home round the clock. Children not at all come into contact with a lot of books in this process, they are just force-fed too many textbooks. Force-feeding children with too many textbooks is a type of child abuse in our country, which must be stopped in order to give childhood back to whom it belongs.
The writer is Executive Editor of SHIKKHALOK, a CDIP
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