Hi readers!
Just read the following thought-provoking quotes about the future
“The best way to predict your future is to create it,”
“Never let the future disturb you. Deal only with the present moment.”
“Future is not something we enter; it is something we create because the only way you can predict the future is to build it”.
How true? But:
The question is how we can create our future?
The first important step is to let your children develop reading skills. Reading helps young children develop language and listening skills, builds vocabulary, inspires creativity, and improves cognitive abilities of our brain, and memory that are demonstrated through communication, reasoning, attention span, problem-solving, thinking, reading and learning. Cognitive skills help us process information by sending it to the correct areas of our brain.
There are ways to stimulate babies brains. Our day-to-day events can be used as exceptional learning opportunities.
Carlota Nelson: a Japanese creative storyteller and documentary film director describe in her documentary “Brain Matters” 5 different ways to setup future of your babies . For details, please visit the following website
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6775008
1. Stimulate baby talk and treat it as real conversation
The sounds and gestures that babies make is their only form of communication. Parents should respond to the baby’s sounds and actions. The number of words a baby is exposed to will determine the amount of words in a child’s vocabulary at the age 2 and a child’s reading levels later.
2. Read to your baby to exercise language
Babies are born with ready-made ability to read and learn. Even at 3 months of age, they can distinguish each sound used in everyday language in the entire world.
3. Use everyday experiences as learning opportunities
For babies, time spent on bath, sorting laundry, or cooking are great learning moments. Narrate what you are doing to stimulate language. Count and sort laundry to teach math and play with food ingredients and textures to promote scientific thinking. Making faces that show different emotions is a great way to teach emotional intelligence.
4. Take play seriously
When children play with each other they learn to compromise and take turns. Take play seriously because it is serious learning. Avoid frequent use of your device in front of your child because it makes children feel less important.
5. Lead by example
Babies pick up everything you do. Until they talk, they become experts at reading faces and non-verbal attitudes (unspoken ways of expressing feelings and thoughts) and learn to mimic them. The way you act around your baby shapes the person they will become. It has everything to do with you, your time and level of engagement.
The second step is even more important and that is selection and arranging quality education, fostering critical thinking skills, adaptability, and love of learning that could be stimulated at the age of 3 month. Quality education develop social and emotional intelligence which equips them to steer through the complexities of the future job market and enable then to contribute positively to society.
Quality education is the provision of knowledge and skills that helps people develop their full potential. It is more than just literacy proficiency, rote learning or numeracy rather it’s a fundamental right for every child.
Dear readers! ask yourself questions like
- Are we preparing our babies to become successful adults?
- Are we providing quality education to our young generation?
- Do we really understand the meaning of
QUALITY EDUCATION?
which means building and upgrading schools that are child-friendly, disability and gender-sensitive, and provide safe, nonviolent, and inclusive spaces for kids.
Pakistan has opposite for all the three. Our children hate going to schools which are no less than a living hell for them because their reading and learning skills were not developed in infancy. Rote learning is a common teaching method where students are expected to memorize and vomit information. This approach is prevalent in both government and private schools. Teachers present information in lectures, and students are assessed on their ability to recall it. Students are encouraged to use cheap study guides that promote rote learning. Teachers expect students to provide the same answers they were given in class.
Dear readers! Don’t you think rote learning is “problem of the problems” that Pakistan is facing today? Certainly YES.
Because
Rote learning
- doesn’t encourage critical thinking or opinion-based thought
- It helps students memorize math exercises but can’t help them understand how things work
It produces students who are unable to
- write a complete sentence neither in English nor in Urdu,
- read an essay, and
- converse fluently in any of the languages including their national language.
Is that not the reason that no Pakistani is seen sitting at a responsible position outside Pakistan?
Visit:
- Hamad International Airport of Doha, Qatar, and watch 100s of Bangladeshi working there at every desk?
- Heathrow airport in England and any of the airports in USA and watch 1000s of Indians working there. How come there is no Pakistani?
Thanks to rote learning
Exam-Forget-Preparation-Learn and Exam again
The unending vicious circle that is not going to brake and so is the fate of our younger generation (60% of our entire population) who are half educated, or uneducated and roaming like a huge crowd of uncouth people unaware of what to do and How to do? and when they cant do, they either become criminals, baggers, or terrorists. Our unfortunate nation doesn’t have the ability to analyze the situation because nobody has bothered to develop such critical thinking in them at their infancy. Now they are directionless animals destroying Pakistan: their only identity which is not being used for any good but to impose the ban on their travelling to certain countries. What a disgrace?
It is still time to act and quickly if those who matter have time to think who will hold the destiny of Pakistan? The baggers, the uncouth crowed, the direction less animal or the terrorists? The choice is still there so, please
“Run to meet the future or it’s going to run you down”
See you next week, take care, Bye.
