Domain of Hecate

An interesting perspective by the WIPRO chief

If you are a parent, you have many aspirations for
your child that may include him or her becoming a
doctor, an engineer, scientist or another kind of
successful professional. I believe these aspirations
are driven by our thinking about your child's future,
and her centrality in your life.

Since good education is often the passport to a good
future, I presume it leads you to getting your child
admitted to a good school. Then you encourage your
child to study hard and do well in the school exams.
To bolster this, you send him or her for tuition
classes. This would have primed your child for board
exam and entrance exams, thereby leading to admission
into a good professional course. Doing well at college
increases the probability of landing a good job. And a
good job means the child's future is ensured.

I am neither a psychologist nor an educationist, and
what I will now state may seem counter-intuitive. I
think that these aspirations and actions might be
doing more harm than good to your child. To understand
why; we need to re-examine some of our fundamental
assumptions.

In the first place, I have seen time and again that
living: for some distant future goal also means you do
not live in the present. The distant goal will always
translate into an external measure of success, such as
exams. And most exam - focused children start
forgetting what it means to be a child, to be curious,
mischievous, exploring, falling, getting up, relating,
discovering, inventing, doing, playing.

Childhood is very precious; precious enough not be
wasted by the artificial pressures of contrived
competition, by too many hours of bookish study; and
by school report cards that simplistically wrap up an
entire human being in numbers.

The second assumption is that education is merely a
ticket to socio-economic success. Give the state of
our country ; this reality cannot be ignored. But
restricting education to only this aspect is, I think,
a very limiting notion of the aim of good education.
The primary purpose of a school is to guide the child
in her discovery of herself and her world, and to
identify and nurture the child's talents. Just as
every seed contains the future tree, each child is
born with infinite potential. Imagine a school which
sees children as seeds to be nurtured - here the
teacher is a gardener who helps to bring out the
potential already present in the child.

This is very different from the current view which
sees the child as clay to be molded - where the
teacher and parents are potters deciding what shape
the clay should take. There is an old (and forgotten)
Chinese saying: "Give a seed to a potter, and you will
get a bonsai".

Even in a commercial organization, to make profits we
do not have to chase profits. Rather, we need to build
an institution that gives every employee an
opportunity to do meaningful and fulfilling work.
Create an organization driven by values of innovation,
integrity, customer centricity and care.

And as you practice these values everyday and moment,
you will see the profits take care of themselves.

Similarly ; dear parent, this is my request to you. Do
not give up your child's present to secure his or her
future. Give your child the freedom to truly explore
life with abandon. In doing this, you will see your
child flower into a creative and sensitive human
being. And when this happens, everything else - money;
social success, security - will fall into place
automatically.

Let your child be a child.

- AZIM PREMJI