BOOKS ARE THE HEROES THAT OUR KIDS DESERVE, BUT NOT THE ONE THEY WANT RIGHT NOW!

What if your brother started an essay about Nepal with the line: 'Nepal is a landlocked country between India and China'? Or even better, how would you react to the first line of your Bachelor's final year studying brother's essay if it read: Nepal is a country? I'm sure you will be clear if you had any doubts about Nepal being a country or a breed of homegrown potato. Another thing that would be clear to you is that your brother is f**ed! Sorry for my French there but yeah, he is gone. Tata! All credit goes to our education system, schools and you, the parents/guardians. No thank you very much!

Those lines above didn’t come from my imagination. They are lines from essays written by real graduate level students. What's worse is that it's not a singular case. The whole country is plagued with this. Every faculty, every college has 70% of its students hopelessly failing in comprehensive writing. No wonder only 20%, 15%, 6% and even an astounding 2% student pass annually in different faculties! That’s more than a million students failing just because they couldn’t write properly what they know. Because they couldn’t memorize the right words and don’t have a rich vocabulary. I have seen my friends struggle to find the exact word for minutes, looking severely constipated and giving up eventually. Hell, I have struggled at it myself so many times!

So please can anyone tell me where did the excellent English speaking environment and English medium education that they constantly brag about go? Okay, I understand that students with government level education have difficulties primarily, because you can't expect them to have good English teacher where teachers scarcely visit the classroom. But we, the proud students of boarding schools don’t have any excuse for this ridicule of language. Actually, it's not even the students’ fault here. Neither is it that of the teachers. Well, partially it is both of their fault but let's move on for now. In fact, if we keep digging, we will reach the inevitable, (almost) clichéd conclusion that it’s the system's fault. We can't change that giant so let's look at something that we can understand and do something about. Here's my simple take on one part of the problem and a simple solution for it.

A few months ago, I started going to RR campus to study English literature mostly because I love literature and secondly because I hoped that I would learn something on writing some myself! So I went there, sat in the Masters first year class and listened to the professors. They say that the first seven minutes is the time that will decide if the students/viewers/listeners will give to the performer or in this case, teachers. If you can't get their attention for that long, you have failed. The TU teachers? They failed. Big time! Out of almost a dozen teachers, only one (Dr. Anand Sharma) could capture the class's attention for the whole period. He was the only person who knew what he was teaching and how. So, there's problem number one. Teachers!

So, I got bored and my eyes started wandering around. I looked at the students, studied them and talked to them and that's when I realized that every single one of them was there for the Master's certificate. No one was there for the love of English. There's your second problem. Students! Those are the very students who will eventually be English teachers in schools. The teachers are utterly boring. They teach by telling the students everything but the fun stuff. The students never read the original text. They can't afford all the books. I'm not sure if they want to. From the beginning of the session, they are searching for the best guess papers and guides. And they successfully upheld the tradition of becoming bad teachers. And soon, they teach the English to teenagers that lead to them writing 7 different spellings of adventurous in a single paragraph.

Of course we cannot change all this. We cannot replace all university professors, we cannot teach them how to teach nor can we help the students fall in love with the language. But there's one single solution to these problems. It will take maybe 5 years to feel the effects but trust me, it WILL have an effect. The solution is "Encourage watching English movies and reading Novels from school level." That’s it! It's as simple as that. Put two novels in every year's syllabus from class four to ten and see the difference. The schools can do that individually or even parents can do that. Parents can encourage kids to read novels like I did. Let them enjoy the Hardy boys, Harry Potter and Goosebumps. Let them join Sinbad and Robinson Crusoe in their adventures. Let them fly with Superman and go on nighttime strolls with Batman, to make people believe in a better world. Take them to movies to watch Hollywood films not the Bollywood crap. They will learn idioms and metaphors before they know what they are. Many of my friends hate the word 'book'. Let us abolish this nonsensical taboo that we have.

Reading books broadens your mind, helps you excel in life, but most of all, reading is good for the soul. Kids need to be rescued from this dark abyss we are throwing them into. Even if we don’t think so, Books are the heroes that our kids deserve, but not the one they want right now! :D

2^nd May, 2014