Children who are read to at an early age, enter school with a vocabulary of 12,000 words, whereas those who are not read to at an early age enter school with 3000 words only.

How unfortunate it is to know that the age of the major developments of the child’s personality and brain are fully ignored by this society.In the first six years, a majority of parents leave their children at the mercy of technology or underage (or untrained) maids.

Can technology, equipped with audio and video,replace books and parents?

It is very unfortunate to see that parents have already given their responsibility up by paying hefty fees for schools and home tutors. The former kills the meaning of education and the latter,the concept of schools.

Our children enter school with the knowledge of incidental learning of 3,000 words and are given previously unknown knowledge to memorise at home for getting a promotion to the next grade. Parents further hand their children over to the tutors for fulfilling therequirements of schools.Unaware of what they are turning their kids into, parents have reduced their children to pawns in their lives. The bigger game of face saving in society is played by parents by using the result cards of their children as the certificate of accomplished parents.

Pakistani parents are not paying for the education and personality development of their children.Instead, they  pay money to make sure their children get good marks–the higher they are in their class, the better. So they can either glorify their magnificent skills of child grooming or snub someone else. In their struggle for marks, they create a sort of negative competition among the children, instead of instilling the spirit of cooperation between them.

Recently, the results of secondary school certificate of multiple boards were declared. I have not gotten a chance to come across a single parent whose child has scored less than 90 percent of the total. The most interesting part is parents saying that their child is very upset for not scoring 100  or even 101marks out of 100.And when you come across the child under discussion in person and ask about their hobbies, they mention: eating, sleeping and studying for exams.

Their tuition starts at 5am.From the tuition centre, they directly go to schools which start at 8am and then in afternoons they take another round of tuition.What they are studying in all this time is simple: rote learning the books and solving past papers. And they appear in exams as machines who can reproduce photocopies of what they have been fed with for more than 12 hours a day.

The sad part is that if you throw a twisted question at them, they are blank. After getting an education in an English medium school for 10 years they cannot talk or write extempore. And a large number of toppers fail professional institutes’ entry exams.

Our society, instead of realizing its faults, comes out onto the roads to demand the dismissal of such exams which toppers of boards can’t pass. Why do parents and teachers not face the reality that the marks of toppers are actually an inflation.These exams neither enhance children’s brainstroming or critical thinking abilities, nor do they reflect their intellectual level. It is high time the concept of tuitions and academies be killed and schools once again revive their actual role of educating students with the art of rhetoric, brainstroming and critical thinking.