The Shriram Millennium School Faridabad

  “Wow!” – it’s a small word. It's muttered in hushed reverence or shrieked in joy or murmured in startled wonder. It’s what a child’s lips exhale when they spot a rainbow, solve a tricky puzzle or find out that caterpillars really do turn into butterflies. Yet in the whirl of applications, curriculum comparisons, school rankings and admissions parties and tours, when do we, as parents, ever seem to stop and think about the power of that little "wow"? In a World Full of Metrics, Don’t Forget the Magic Parenting today is often project management. Milestones to tick off. Goals to accomplish. Checklists to complete. We feel as if we are racing from the moment our children begin crawling – not just to make sure they’re walking, but to make sure they’re walking faster. We track their reading level. Monitor their handwriting. Compare their scores. Somehow, in all of this design and aspiration, we occasionally overlook the obvious: children are not data points. They are discover...

  It’s so strange how kids have that way of stopping you in your tracks with the simplest question. We all have come across that awe when a 6 year old inquires, “Why is the sky not falling?,”  while gazing wistfully out the car window at storm-clouded skies. It wasn’t even the innocence – it was the curiosity, the real need to know. And that question stayed with me a lot longer than it should. And as a parent, it serves as a gentle reminder – our children are not mere receptacles to pour information into. They are watchers, thinkers, travelers. Which gets to a larger thought – what kind of spaces really foster that spirit? What We Want From Schools Beyond Marks Education is something beyond completing syllabus and receiving grades, and contrary to what people think. It’s not about creating memory machines that can recall definitions upon request. True education is in giving the child the freedom to wonder, the right to understand, the will to serve. A child must be given the ...

  You’re probably aware of this if you’ve ever watched a child build a sandcastle – it’s never just about the sand. It’s about trying out ideas, seeing what holds up and what falls down, what survives the motion of a wave and what succumbs to the pull of gravity. There’s instinct, imagination, resilience – and, most of all, there is joy in the attempt. But imagine if education followed suit. Far too often, we mistake structure for constraint and guidance for control. Somewhere between standardized tests and strict schedules we begin shaving off the very corners that make our children note-worthy. But what if we are not supposed to contain childhood, or control it from the outside all the time? What if the best kind of schooling helps children find the compass inside – to know at every phase of life how to figure out, to walk their own path, or, for some children, to dance their way to a solution or draw their own map? Beyond GPS: Trusting the Journey In a world obsessed with goals,...