A syllabus for emotional stability

Teachers’ Day is a time to think about what children and their educators have to face together in an ‘educational arms race’

At long last, vaulting over an intense concentration on the material world and attempts to pass on an understanding of it to children in watertight blocks of knowledge (mathematics, history, biology, physics and so on) is a deep concern about their emotional condition as they return to their classrooms. In previous years, lip service was paid to emotional quotient and life skills, but now everyone knows for sure that without these inner resources, all education is doomed to produce a generation of people who understand themselves and the forces acting upon their environment even less than their parents or grandparents did in their time. In India, children are lucky to be attending school at all, given that unlettered millions join the workforce every year as child labourers.