Some Thoughts

The first ten years of a human life are the most influential ones in shaping character. Utmost care is therefore required in providing the best possible education to a child at the youngest age. One may wonder what the best age is to begin in an elementary school for an average child. Although, there is no uniform consensus on this, my own experience suggests that an age between five and six is the right age to begin education at grade 1 level. Thereby a child will be about eighteen years old when he has finished twelve years of primary, middle and high school education. He or she would then be an adult and ready to enter university. That appears to be the right practice because then a person is ready to move out of a closely supervised school education as a minor to a university where greater freedom is available and necessary for intellectual development as an adult.

It is appropriate that a child be provided at the most one year of preschool education beginning at an age between four and five where he can develop some basic skills of social interaction and discipline to begin formal education at grade one level. Children less than four require individual and special care that can only be provided within the home by parents.

It is neither necessary nor advisable to teach the child anything more than the knowledge of a few alphabets and numbers from one to ten at this Kinder Garten level. This level of schooling is primarily for supervised play in the company of other children for a few hours a day. Thus an elementary school is visualized here as consisting of one year of Kinder Garten followed by four years of grade one to four. Subsequent to this a child will be ready to move on to a middle school consisting of children that are nine years or older.

I presently live in India. Present day India is emerging from the dark ages after centuries of poverty. Due to historical neglect severe areas of backwardness persist within the country, but now that India has begun to progress economically, it appears that progress in other areas is bound to follow. There is a need to develop a new model for a school suitable for present day India – a model worth emulating by others.

The present variety of elementary education schools in India vary from expensive private schools that can be afforded only by the rich to free schools run by governments or charitable organizations. The latter provide a valuable service in carrying education to the poor, however most are quite deprived of resources so that they are not able to provide quality education.

This author has been debating the launching of primary schools where enlightened as well as socially, ethically and environmentally responsible education based on the best available practices on our planet may be provided to children with education being free of all costs to fifty percent of children from economically challenged homes.

It is felt that a mixed school rather than one exclusively for underprivileged children has advantages. It provides essential and wider social interaction than a school exclusively for rich or underprivileged children. The wider social interaction is beneficial for both the poor and the privileged. Moreover, the school can then hope to become sustainable rather than depend entirely on outside contributions from Government or charity. The target areas for such schools in India are in the vicinity of small towns of poor districts of India rather than remote rural areas where such a mixed population may not be available.

The present blog will be used to develop the concepts and plan for such a school. The author hopes to utilize his wide international experience in education to develop these ideas in order to arrive at best practices. Suggestions from readers interested in children’s education will be valuable at this planning stage. The contribution of Philanthropists to help carry this effort forward will be welcome.

A difficulty with utilizing a blog for the present endeavour is that posts cannot be arranged at will but rather the first post appears last as new posts are added. Therefore this introductory post will appear at the end of the blog. In order to overcome this difficulty, it is my intention to enter some blank posts that may be filled later so that eventually posts appear in the proper order.

I do not know if I shall be a successful in developing this project but there shall be no hope of it unless a beginning is made. Let us see how far it goes and for that my intention is to play it by the ear.