Children are not childish - Education needs to give them credit

Yesterday Anvitha, a young schoolgirl and an avid birdwatcher reached out for help to rescue a black kite from what could have been a slow and painful death. I'll let you take a look at the two messages - one with her call for help and one with how she actually managed to gather people and eventually rescue the bird.

First message

Hi, just now while coming from school I saw a black Kite that was caught by a thread in a tree. What can be done to help it? The tree is quite high to climb and to cut the thread. Is there something I can do as my house is quite close to my school?

Second message

I went to that area where I saw the bird. The bird was still struggling. I asked help from my aunt who was near by and one of my teacher. We thought of climbing the tree and cutting the thread but the tree was too thin and long to climb. We took a stick to remove the string but the stick was short. Seeing us trying to help the bird many neighbors came and one of them brought a long stick and thread. We joined the 2 sticks. One of the bike riders seeing us stopped by and helped us. He was tall and so he stood on a long chair and tried removing the thread. We were holding a blanket to catch the bird if it falls down. The thread was cut and the bird fell on the ground. It hopped a few times and then flew away. At first it flew in the ground level and then was able to fly high. It was a memorable movement for me. I was happy to see the over whelming response from the neighbors. Many actually saw it but thought it was dead. After carefully seeing those innocent eyes blinking they came helping :). One of the things what I saw was - at first when i saw the kite while coming home, many black kites were trying to push the bird. Did they do that to help the bird?

Children are capable of wonderful things. Uncorrupted by our desire to compete, win, think way too far into the future - children are capable of demonstrating maturity, given half a chance. Anvitha herself is a passionate nature lover. Her knowledge of birds can put an adult like me to shame. Did this happen as a consequence of her school curriculum? I doubt it. Did it happen due to the right context and her own passion - I suspect so. Education needs to give children credit for the fact that they can choose their own paths. So should schools be more about creating context than imparting knowledge? Is knowledge really scarce in this world? If so, then how does Anvitha know so much about birds? Can you really bind down a kid's human ability to create, think, dream, be sensitive to curriculum alone? What role do parents play? These are important questions.

Kids don't surprise us - we just haven't given them a chance

"Learning between grown ups and kids should be reciprocal. The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it." - Adora Svitak

We often term kids as doing something 'beyond their years'. I believe that to be a truly discriminatory way of thinking. Yes, kids do need guidance. Yes they do need exposure and context setting. From that point on though, it's really about letting passion and the human desire to learn and create to set in. I love the fact that young Tom Suarez (above) got the opportunity to set up an App club in his school. That even if programming iOS apps wasn't part of curriculum his parents and school gave him the opportunity to pursue his passion. At 12 years old, he's a developer that's looking to expand his skills to program on both the iOS and Android platform. We have adults here who'd die for that opportunity. I'd really love for schools to give children this ability to try, fail, learn, succeed than to confine them to the realms of curriculum. For what it's worth, we adults have perhaps more to learn from them than we give them credit for.