Saturday, November 5, 2016

Gentleman

I saw the word ‘gentleman’ in a text book of my son. It was perhaps his nursery or kindergarten book from many years ago. There was a picture above the word of a man in a suit and tie and a bag in his hand. The purpose of this picture was to teach the meaning of the word ‘gentleman’ and its spelling to the child. We possibly achieved this purpose but in the process we did a great disservice to the child, we committed a crime. We etched a picture in the child’s mind that a gentleman is a person wearing a suit, boots and tie and holding a bag.

With this picture in mind, the child of a farmer, a teacher or a laborer will never consider his father a gentleman since they don’t wear suits. If occasionally a person wears a suit for a function or a marriage then child comments – wow you are looking like a gentleman!

Not only children but adults make the same comment and are even impressed. There is a difference between how we talk to an unknown person in suit versus how we talk to a person in a dhoti-kurta. How did this bias come in our society? Through such books, we inculcated this bias right from childhood.

This might be small thing. We don’t pay attention to such things. However, in our ignorance we pass on a lot of harmful biases to our children.

3 comments:

  1. Sir, their are many things that need to be changed in syllabus like history books these books don't teach us the power we possessed on the world few centuries back. These books always shows ys that how inferior we were and how we were obsessed by the rules who ruled over us.....in the history books their are big chapters on mughuls and britishers but only a small paragraph on maratha empire however maratha empire ruled almost a century​ over India...Nationalism cannot​ be learn by listening bhashans but can be taught by giving good education about our great Indian history.
    I request you to please look into this matter and review the History syllabus .
    From - A science student

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  2. They ask why do you teach calculus, trigonometry, algebra etc, as none of these topics are related to their daily lives. Alas! Their mathematics teacher failed to teach them mathematics. Irony is that I meet teachers too who ask the same questions time and again in seminars.
    Curriculum and teaching methodology should be chosen by teachers. I succeeded in this scenario.
    I feel satisfied when someone asks my students the same questions, problems. They never fail to answer them and they apply all these mathematical ideas in their daily lives.

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