There are different perspective to the problem since in some cases it is the parent who chooses to engage the child in labor/household chores specially in underserved communities, and in some cases the child falls out of the learning cycle.
From a decision makers/parents perspective, Prachi has very aptly shared the reasons for all of us to explore best solutions. This share is from a child’s perspective and more so from underserved communities which largely face this issue of dropping out of schools or very low attendance.
We, all adults, if look inwards, how and why do we learn anything at all? Any skill, habit, lifestyle or art that we learn, why do we really do that? Largely two reasons:
- We enjoy learning & experiencing the learning process and
- We see our growth and aspirations being fulfilled with the learning.
Now let’s look at the question from a child’s perspective:
Do the schools of today, the affordable private schools & govt schools for the underserved kids give them any such experience?
Does a child really happily and proactive enjoy the learning process that is being followed in the schools? and…
Can he clearly connect the learning to his/her growth and aspirations practically not theoretically… That’s the gap we all need to fulfil.
Enjoyable Learning
There can be various ways in which we as the adult community serving them have to try:
- Game based Learning
- Storytelling
- Role Plays
- Digital learning
- Activities and Community Service Involvement for Kids at School
- Music as a way to learn
- Art/Drawing/Painting on the subjects/topics as a way to learn
- Dance as a part of learning
Lots of conscious educators have been doing amazing experiments with enjoyable learning and we need to bring them into mainstream school education with access for everyone.
Connect Schools to Life Skills & Growth
Connecting school education to real life skills and growth is another very important need of the hour and can be initiated via industry connect, inspirational books, biographies, leadership sessions and activity based experiential learning.
Achievers in every sphere of life can be connected to school kids via short messages, brief sessions, digital connect or any way, in order to bring practical inspiration to them in which ever field their energies go.
Various other ways would have been tried by best of educators somewhere in some regions, but they are just dependent on some conscious educators and mentors. We need to democratize access to such ways of learning for everyone.
To sum up for now, we need to solve these two gaps, in order to ensure that the children happily attend school regularly, seeing it as their source of happiness and future growth.
P.S.: We, at iDream Education, are trying to do a bit towards this, via facilitating access to enjoyable digital learning in their own language to underserved rural learners. Connect with our work at www.idreameducation.org