Neelam Wallia,
Principal, Maheshwari Public School
Degrees can give you good jobs, but they will not give you life skills
The foremost task for any preadolescent is to learn the basic skills necessary to nurture. Unfortunately most of us fail to learn such skills even after reaching adulthood. The training for a child must start from the beginning, when he is still under the care of his parents.
Most families are nuclear families, where both parents are working, and they don’t have much time to spare for their children. It is not a question of family values, it is just that we are becoming more workaholic. We live in two separate cultural worlds, one encompassing the workplace and one encompassing home and family.
In such a situation, the entire burden of training the child comes on the shoulders of teachers. We have to teach them to grow up into brilliant and productive future citizens of the country. Every small thing that a teacher does can have an impact on the future of the child. Cultural training of children needs more time and effort. Passing on the collective knowledge of past generations to future generations is one of the noblest callings in the world. Someone has to make efforts to teach young people, the basic facts, the valuable skills, and the wisdom that has come to us from past generations.
We say that character education is a way of doing everything in the school. It’s not one particular programme or focus; it’s everything we do that influences the kind of human beings students become. Kids everywhere face the same issues, the same challenges, and the same realities. Perhaps the youngsters from more privileged backgrounds are in better position to struggle because they’ve had better nurturing, they have better role models, wider opportunities, and the like.
Degrees can give you good jobs, degrees can give you a very good pay package, but it cannot give you life skills.
