There is hardly a day when the daily newspaper does not send shivers down my spine by one or the other horrifying incident and makes me wonder where, as a society, are we heading.
What is worse and dreadful is the fact that in the most gruesome of the acts it is our youth who is involved and is at it’s worst.
Much as it makes me scared for the future and safety of our children, it also makes me ponder hard as to what’s going wrong & where and what exactly do we need to do or change to make the world a better place to live in.
After a long deep contemplation, I have realised that it all begins at school. Today, children spend more time at school and with their peers than with their families. So, it is very important for our schooling system and environment to be structured efficiently and comprehensively.
In our materialistic society where there is cut-throat competition at every step of life, the reputation of a school is set on the basis of the percentage its students score and the colleges they get admission in.
Sadly this materialism is eating up our society from within making it hollow as in the prime years of his development when a child needs to be nurtured holistically, few vital aspects of his basic human nature are overlooked terribly because of our faulty education system and wrong prioritisation.
We need to transform whole education system and instead lay an emphasis developing our children into good human beings before brilliant students. Once the foundation laid is flawless and robust, the results achieved will be nothing but desirable.
Talking about holistic development, human nature can be broadly categorised into four aspects namely, Physical, Mental, Emotional and Spiritual.
While today much emphasis is on the mental aspect, which covers the learning skills and intelligence, many of our good schools today are also making efforts towards the proper physical development of children by providing well-balanced meals or menus and giving decent weightage to games and physical activities.
However, what’s lacking and needs to be worked upon is the emotional and spiritual development of each child as unless each of the aspects of a child’s basic nature is nurtured, a balanced social structure cannot be obtained.
Considering the kinds of misdeeds our juveniles and young adults are involved in, it's time to stimulate the innate sensitivity in our children and strengthen their empathy making them better at not only handling their own emotions but also understanding and responding better to those of others.
But we cannot stop here as the foundation of emotional balance is set upon a sound spiritual balance.
This is so, as it is fundamentally Spiritual Quotient which sets us apart from animals who definitely have certain IQ and are also seen to have some EQ, however, until now no research has shown animals having SQ.
Putting it another way, a human being lacking a certain SQ is just as good as an animal. And haven’t we witnessed the animalistic behaviour of human beings time and again!?
Man being intrinsically spiritual goes haywire when he loses touch with his spiritual self which is humble, peaceful, unselfish, kind and a fragment of the divine. Soaked in materialism he forgets all that he is and instead becomes egoistic, violent, selfish, greedy, cruel and animalistic. All violent acts, we witness day to day, are triggered or inspired by one of the above.
So it becomes imperative that we address the need of the hour and overhaul our education system and work towards the development of our naïve children into physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually sound youngsters who can lead our world into a bright, happy future.
Credits: the picture used has been taken from jen-irishu.com
