‘Teaching kids to death’ must stop!
Apr 22, 2009
EDITOR—On Monday, an anonymous parent wrote a letter entitled “Save us from Homisdallen and Bulobaâ€. I wish to add my voice to the issues raised in the letter. Two schools, Homisdallen and Buloba High have extended the term by three weeks but at a h
EDITOR—On Monday, an anonymous parent wrote a letter entitled “Save us from Homisdallen and Bulobaâ€. I wish to add my voice to the issues raised in the letter. Two schools, Homisdallen and Buloba High have extended the term by three weeks but at a high financial cost to the parents and at the expense of the students who need some rest.
True to the writer’s assertion, the brain and the body need to rest in order to rejuvenate and get ready for another long and busy term. Additionally, when you deny students holidays, you are detaching them from the other vital functions of the family such as joint worshipping, parental guidance, family work training, general interaction, inter-family and inter-community interaction, etc. These activities ensure a balanced development of a child. They are important functions that were envisaged by the first designers of school curriculums.
Why then the current trend for some schools not to observe the holidays?
Competition for ‘super grades’ has engulfed both the parents and even school administrators who are supposed to know better. Teaching during holidays gives the schools more time to ‘drill’ the students in order to obtain the ‘super grades’ so that the schools can be perceived to be very good.
This is why some schools are terribly crowded. It is common to find a school with 2000 students while others which have plenty of space and facilities are under-populated.
Besides, teaching in holidays is a popular method of holding parents at ransom who are forced to pay through the nose. All teachers go to the same colleges and universities, so why the wide discrepancy in grades? The fact of the matter is that God endowed us differently and no amount of drilling will make all the students attain the same intellectual levels even when they have scored the same high grades at O’ and A’ levels. They will eventually be sorted out at higher institutions of learning and thereafter in life! How can a student enjoy studies when he or she is being drilled all the time even during holidays?
The system creates pseudo-academicians.
We would be far better off spending just enough time on academics and sparing the rest on other real-life skills. This is a notion that parents need to understand in order to get liberated from the ‘super grades syndrome’. Instead of scrambling for the already crowded and unreasonably demanding schools which even send away the academically weak students, parents should start looking at the other young but promising schools which are not crowded, yet offer the same academic programmes as the popular schools and the pass rates are reasonably good. A child develops better academically and socially when, for instance, he sleeps in a dormitory where he has good space around him, in a school where every teacher knows him by name and character and where a parent can get enough time to discuss the child’s progress with his teachers. ‘Teaching to death’ is an artificial method and will never create intellectuals but robots!
We need a revolution to acquire quality education for our children and this requires intellectually liberated parents.
Yvonne Kyakonye
Kampala
True to the writer’s assertion, the brain and the body need to rest in order to rejuvenate and get ready for another long and busy term. Additionally, when you deny students holidays, you are detaching them from the other vital functions of the family such as joint worshipping, parental guidance, family work training, general interaction, inter-family and inter-community interaction, etc. These activities ensure a balanced development of a child. They are important functions that were envisaged by the first designers of school curriculums.
Why then the current trend for some schools not to observe the holidays?
Competition for ‘super grades’ has engulfed both the parents and even school administrators who are supposed to know better. Teaching during holidays gives the schools more time to ‘drill’ the students in order to obtain the ‘super grades’ so that the schools can be perceived to be very good.
This is why some schools are terribly crowded. It is common to find a school with 2000 students while others which have plenty of space and facilities are under-populated.
Besides, teaching in holidays is a popular method of holding parents at ransom who are forced to pay through the nose. All teachers go to the same colleges and universities, so why the wide discrepancy in grades? The fact of the matter is that God endowed us differently and no amount of drilling will make all the students attain the same intellectual levels even when they have scored the same high grades at O’ and A’ levels. They will eventually be sorted out at higher institutions of learning and thereafter in life! How can a student enjoy studies when he or she is being drilled all the time even during holidays?
The system creates pseudo-academicians.
We would be far better off spending just enough time on academics and sparing the rest on other real-life skills. This is a notion that parents need to understand in order to get liberated from the ‘super grades syndrome’. Instead of scrambling for the already crowded and unreasonably demanding schools which even send away the academically weak students, parents should start looking at the other young but promising schools which are not crowded, yet offer the same academic programmes as the popular schools and the pass rates are reasonably good. A child develops better academically and socially when, for instance, he sleeps in a dormitory where he has good space around him, in a school where every teacher knows him by name and character and where a parent can get enough time to discuss the child’s progress with his teachers. ‘Teaching to death’ is an artificial method and will never create intellectuals but robots!
We need a revolution to acquire quality education for our children and this requires intellectually liberated parents.
Yvonne Kyakonye
Kampala