Lost Childhood

Courtesy - The Island By Fr Chryso Pieris SJ

When I look back nostalgically at my childhood and compare it with the tight school and tuition schedules of present day children who do not have any free time during the whole day to be carefree, noisy, joyful children full of energy, I feel very sad. This sadness, I felt for the tragic loss of childhood joys of modern children, has been gnawing and irritating me for a long time because it is a highly complex problem involving every aspect of our social, economic and political life with no easy solution in sight. (My childhood came to an end more than fifty years ago when I took the O/L examination in December 1959.) Mulling over this problem and other related problems of education in our country, finally, I have decide to share it with you, who bother to read what I write, and discuss the possibility of restoring the joys of childhood back to our children.

To begin with let us clarify some ideas about our schools. Who is the central most important person in the school, without whom there is no school? The easy and simple answer is it is the child-student. Absolutely everything and everybody in the school must be for her/him; nothing, nobody not the principal or the teacher not even the Election-Commissioner or the President of the country can take precedence and put the child-student in the second place and put her/him out of the school whenever they feel like it. Everybody in the school and those serving in the Education Department and the Ministry are at the service of the students, ready always to cater to the students’ needs and only students’ needs and nobody else’s.

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