Expectations Vs Achievements

 Expectations Vs Achievements

There is hardly anyone on the planet who does not have any expectations from the investment of time, energy, and money they make at any point of time in their lives. Some of the basic expectations we all have in common are safe shelter, nourishing food, decent clothes, good education, and above all personal freedom in making the choices. Of these basic expectations only about 40 percent of people across the world are able to meet them while the rest still struggle very hard to fulfill these yet they end up their lives in vain. 

 According to the UN Sustainable Development Goals Report of 2019, about 736 million people lived in abject poverty in 2015, of which the Sub-Saharan region alone comprised 413 million. At a time when the database showcases such a bleak image of the majority of world population especially in  the South Asian and Sub-Saharan  region, our children who have comfortable access to these expectations and beyond must feel blessed and fortunate to work harder in their capacities in sorting out the problems of scarcity in these regions in the future.

 Now the question arises as to how these young fortunate children across the planet can initiate and apply an all-out endeavor to do away with the abject poverty deeply rooted in the multitude of these regions, if not now, but in the offing or the next two decades.

 At this point one of the crudest ideas that often hit my mind is how the more fortunate children will be able to support the less fortunate as long as they are not empowered and equipped with the 21st-century problem solving skills however trivial they might be.

 The next question is where, when and who will equip and empower these children with the problem-solving skills that can comfortably stand the test of time. Now, this question undoubtedly leads anyone to the altar of learning centers-the schools or the stakeholders of education in general; where the major role players are governments and private education company owners.

 One of the most dazzling queries today’s parents or the consumers of these private and public education systems have is how far do these education management systems care for the future of children and the world in a broader sense. Have they been changing and updating their curricula to meet the needs of this fast-changing world (Nepal Government, for instance, changed its High School English Curriculum after 28 years: 1992-2020!) or are their curricula and pedagogy advocate the obsolete needs of the pre/industrial era; train people to operate a certain machine under the strict supervision of a foreman, in other words, factory workers, who do nothing more than follow orders and instructions.

 How far do you think today’s children, especially teenagers like these kinds of instructions at schools or homes?

• “Stand up!”
• “Sit down!”
• “Keep quiet!”
• “Take out your books!”
• “Copy down the notes!”
• “Don’t walk through the meadow!”
• “Walk in a line!”
• “Don’t speak!”
• “No side talks!”
• “Get your hair trimmed!”
• “Wear the right socks!”
• “No parallel pants!”
• “No choose pants!”
• “Only knee length skirts!”
• “No mufflers!”
• “Carry all the textbooks and notebooks!”
• “Never answer back!”
• “Go to page # 208!”
• “Complete the homework by tomorrow morning!”
• “No washrooms before/after the recesses!" 
• Etcetera, etcetera.

When today’s world needs creative and proactive human resources to independently solve the problems and act preemptively to sort out the imminent glitches in any field, can you imagine the generation of children which is brought up in such a controlled mechanism for almost 8 hours a day all year-round, for nearly 18 long years will ever be able to take bold decisions or preemptively solve any problems? My own experience absolutely contradicts this way of bringing up children. You may score more in the summative tests and make your parents and teachers happy for the moment, but when it comes to scoring in real life, you might fail thereby not even allowing yourself to stand again as you were told in the schools that failing was disgraceful, morally unethical, and socially unacceptable.

 There is yet another question as to why today’s children have no affinity or attachment to the schools they are studying at or why they hate going to schools. Why are they no longer proud of their alma mater? Well, there could be many reasons, but my experience says that the major reason is there is no freedom and autonomy at schools but rules and batons that make you walk on the sharp blades of a khukuri, a traditional Nepali weapon, at all times--these poor kids are not in charge of their own lives!

Let’s observe some of the binary extremes of our static education and the dynamic needs of the present and probably the future in the table below.

 The Irony of Feeds Vs Needs

SN	Static Education (Feeds)	Dynamic Needs
1	Silent students-good	Leaders/marketing/sales/motivators
2	Wait for instruction to act as per the command/orders	Independent thinkers/problem solvers
3	Inauthentic/hypothetical learning	Face real-life problems in real times
4	Exams test memory and information retention.	Society wants analysts and critical thinkers.
5	Parents/schools want better marks.	The workplace/market wants better performance.
6	No room for individual interests and passions (Diversity) -uniformity: all are expected to learn the same thing at the same time but at different locations/geography of the country.	The world needs a versatile workforce inclusive of all races, genders, and psychosomatic abilities to work in different fields at the same time in different geographies of the same country.
7	Overlooks and ignores the true potential of a student.	Asks what strengths and weaknesses the applicant for a post has.
8	Hardly teach life skills like frugality, entrepreneurship.	The market needs executives that best control finance and lead to growth.
9	Does not teach/train how to survive in a crisis.	Crisis management is an integral skill to get a job.
10	Focus merely on the completion of the syllabus and forget the goals of the curricula.	Want graduates to focus on meeting the periodical objectives of the companies.
11	It takes as long as 18 years to achieve a high school degree-huge investment!	It takes as much as 16 years to retire from the armed forces-lifetime reward.
12	Give the least value to cultural practices and their promotions.	Want everyone to observe and demonstrate their love and respect towards their unique culture and traditions.
13	Students become exam-oriented and forget the concepts learned after the examinations.	The mathematical and scientific logic learned at school frequently helps people solve their everyday basic problems.
14	Time/stress/trauma (bullies) management are hardly any topics of value.	Life is all about time stress/trauma management (home/work/holiday) (Bullying is not limited to schools alone)
15	Teach swimming/football in theory in the classroom. (Practical subjects like Maths/Science/Languages)	Often there are floods and matches in the country.(Require labs/lifelike setting/fields)
16	Probably won't know what self-control and emotional health means.	Peace of mind and even success is determined by one’s emotional health and self-control.
17	Gadgets are a thing of the spoiled brats.	The whole ecosystem of life relies on gadgets.
18	Teach how to control, compete and outperform the rest.	Life is all about how to connect and collaborate and leverage a task.
19	Solve the problems only in the well-defined parameters fed by the teachers.	Creativity demands the solution of the problem in the most efficient ways.
20	The practice of detaining a student in the same grade just because he could not meet the threshold by 2, 3, 4, or 5%.	Placements are made/reserved according to individual abilities.
21	Only instructions and no say-- program young students’ brains to only take orders and not process or make independent decisions.	The world needs innovators, inventors, analysts, and leaders to shape and engineer the future that makes life more comfortable.

Conclusion 

 Our achievements let us down when there is a mismatch between our expectations and the processes towards translating them into the desired goals. There must be a clear jurisdiction and job description for both parents and teachers as to what and how much a child should be taught at home and what s/he should be offered to learn at school. If we ask and force a teenager to follow the basic instructions mentioned above the table that s/he should have already learned in his/her younger years, would they not feel being undermined and patronized because by now they know the importance of these things. They appear not much bothered by these basic practices for the reason that we overfeed them the same data. Did we, as mentors, ever try to peep into the reasons for their ignorance towards these school rules? How do you, as grown-ups, feel that you must listen and follow the same thing that you have already been practicing for quite a long time? Therefore, let our teenagers learn by seeing, doing, failing, falling, and rising. Why not allow them some autonomy to take charge of certain things they are capable of? Listening to children carefully and answering or explaining their questions wisely can instill in them a sense of pride, confidence, and responsibility which ultimately lead to critical thinking followed by good decision making and not be like a bot waiting for the instruction to be fed to start to work! Only then will the fortunate children grow up to take the initiatives that best sort out the problems not only in their native lands but also in the entire world.

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