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Dr.Kalyani Roy
Secretary Society for the Advancement of education
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Through all our institutions the two great imperatives which are in a way axioms or guiding principles are that :
(A) Children should enjoy learning and
(B) That learning should be meaningful.
For children to enjoy learning it is necessary that teachers should enjoy their work -which is teaching-learning and all the concomitant
activities that go with it. This brings us to a significant difference in the light in which we see the teacher's role from the commonly
held one. When we speak of the teacher as a facilitator we are, in my opinion, trivializing the role of the teacher. The teacher is a
leader and a guide opening the doors of perception for the children as it were. The inspirational role of the teacher is crucial to the
transactions between the student and the teacher and cannot be ignored. It is the reason why children remember their teachers long after
they have left school. Our effort therefore is directed to removing this dichotomy and restoring to the teacher his or her rightful place.
For learning to be meaningful it is necessary that what children learn in the classroom should be related to their everyday lives and
the environment, natural and urban, geographical and political to their values and their attitudes. Too often we find their knowledge is
theoretical. Crack the modernist liberal veneer and we see beneath the neo-colonial model based on the British Indian mode we have been
schooled in.
Finally a word about values. Values cannot be taught as we all know but we talk as if they can. Values have to filter through the fine
print of the filigree of words and actions, tones and gestures.
In these times of changing values when patriotism may be an outmoded idea in the name of which innumerable atrocities have been perpetrated,
faith and confidence in oneself and in one's fellow men and pride and joy in work well done can never be outmoded. I hope we can revive this
spirit of purposeful labour and learning in us and in our children. Book learning will look after itself.
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Message
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Ms.Poornima Narayan
Principal
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Childhood is one of the most wonderful experiences a person can have. The great English romantic poet, William Wordsworth
talks of the magic of childhood and of his belief in the child’s memory of an earlier,purer existence before birth:”But trailing clouds
of glory do we come….”,and the tragedy of forgetting about it as the child grows up. Wordsworth likens growing up to the shades of
the prison-house closing in on the child. And childhood is inevitably linked with school, classes, teachers, school friends,
exams…the list goes on and on..
Our endeavor, in Cambridge School, is to see that every child is given an opportunity to develop his potential to the fullest. Not
just an opportunity but every incentive to do so, whether it be in academics, extracurricular activities or sports. At the same time I
would emphasize the importance of certain things we tend to overlook in the mad, competitive world of achievement and getting on in
life. I mean things like friendship, the capacity to communicate and share values, catholicity of taste, a liberal and positive attitude
to life and the capability to empathize with those less fortunate. We must always remember that we are the most fortunate ,the favored
ones, for there are millions of children in our country who grow up without the shelter of economic security, wit out the protection of
their parents, without the security of a settled home or the assurance of three square meals a day. It is my hope that we can nurture
and sustain these principles or ethics in every child so that the child grows up into a thinking ,caring adult, and a worthy citizen of
India, not just an automaton programmed to do well in examinations and be competitive.
I hope I can inculcate some of these ideals in children so that ,long after ,they look back and say that childhood was really
wonderful, that is, literally, a time to wonder at the beauty and majesty of the world and life itself.
I wish every child the very best of everything in life.
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