Saturday, March 31, 2012

Traditions that need to be defied

Progress can be defined in a number of ways, but some that come to mind immediately are: moving forward, adapting to circumstances, and evolving. It is surprising then that the way we teach children in primary schools and what they are taught have remained more or less unchanged over the years. This lack of progress is what motivated a youth group in Multan to start a Social Action Project (SAP) to help rectify the problem.

The group is named The Janbaz Youth Group and their SAP aims to correct education at its very root – primary school. The SAP was conceived and is being led by Noshaba who is a trained psychologist. The group holds the view that the only way to move forward is to motivate children to do better in school and keep them interested in the material being taught. A key contributing factor to this is implementing a fun and interesting way of teaching in primary schools.

So far the group has managed to arrange four training sessions for primary school teachers focussing on modern teaching methods and techniques. These sessions were attended by 28 teachers in all. Typical areas of discussion in these training sessions are traditional teaching methods that are still being implemented in primary schools and their limitations, and advantages of adopting modern teaching methods.

Progress can be defined in a number of ways, and one of them is being brave enough to challenge established conventions when there is a better way to do some thing. The SAP started by The Janbaz Youth Group does just this – it is a step taken by a group of young people to replace inefficient and dated teaching methods with newer and better ones, it is a step in the right direction; it is a step towards progress.

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