How APPs destroy Students Creativity and prepares them for a life of Poverty and failure
There was a time when children flocked around their grand dads and grand moms to hear tales of the Lion and the mouse, the Rabbit and Tortoise, the Angry Giant, the Foolish Maid, the Greedy Merchant, so on and so forth.
When Children slept, their minds were tossed back to the time these virtual events happened. They chewed on some of the predicaments that the casts faced and visualized as to what actions they would have carried out, if they were exposed to the same situation.
Stories such as these stimulates the hearer to enact and play the entire play in their minds, thus, they become, the directors, the play writes, the musicians, and even the technicians, during the audition of the play, where their mind is the stage and their actors were their visions.
Imagination the producer of Great Writers
Leo Tolstoy, the writer of the world famous, Novel, “War and Peace”, when asked how he managed to write such a compelling story, responded by saying that he merely gave the summary of events that he came across in real life.
Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate, who received several accolades for his poem, “The Paper boat”, merely recorded his childhood experience.
Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, the writer who wrote, “Crime and Punishment”, transformed himself into the character, Raskolnikoff and narrates the dimensional existence of animalistic virtues latent in every human.
The experiences of Raskolnikoff merely harmonizes those of Mikhailovich’s experiences from the Siberian Prison camp.
Issac Newton, got the entire principle of Gravity from laying down under an Apple tree, connecting thoughts with inquisitive childish questions such as, “why the Apple didn’t fly?”
Imagination is critical for Success
Einstein’s famous quotes, Success is, 99% Imagination and 1 % perspiration, still stands good. Though it not a must that every child ought to ascend to the league of Einsteins and Newtons, yet still, it also doesn’t mean that we could adopt standards and training practices that would make them unfit even to lead a life of self respect and honor.
What you want your Child to become in future? The answer depends on parents
The famous proverbial statement says, “Train the child in the way he/she has grow up, and when he/she has grown up, he/she shall Never depart from the path shown”, seems to have fallen down the wayside, when it comes to raising Children. Parents should be held responsible.
The reason, the cause lies in our inability to say “No”. Over the past years, we have been trained and tuned become, Mr. Yes and Ms. Yes, when it came to opening our lives to Technological gadgets and APPs.
The I-Phone Technology-Boon or Bane
Take for example, the I-Phone technology, that caused all to marvel and embrace, is now the prime culprit, responsible for businesses filing for bankruptcy, supermarket chains collapses and many of the small businesses going into oblivion and unemployment rates rising each day. Now would you believe? The same I-Phone technology is now taking a toll on the minds of young children.
If you were to walk into any high school and ask a teen as to what he desires most, the most probable answer would be “Play station”. One of the T-shirts, sported by a teen, carried this message,” I am ready for Ex-change, my girlfriend for Play Station.”
Our Major Priorities have taken the back seat, while our Minor Priorities had become the Captain.
The Idiosyncrasies of today is that, people spend a truck load of money to train their dogs and cats, expecting behavioral standard of the highest order from these animals, on the contrary, the same people have been found to spend less than an hour of quality time with their children and baby sit them with their Mobile Phones and Tablets.
Apart from the health hazards that these Phones bring upon a child, under the name of Education Apps, they Mute, Blind and Kill a Child’s creativity.
When Movies and Programs have censoring, why aren’t there any Regulations to protect Children and their creativity, against the evil influences of APPS.
A simple Subway ride will show the state that we are in
Just take a short ride in a subway, if you were to find a school going teen, then for sure, you will find him or her with a Mobile phone, and with eyes seriously fixed on to the screen, so fixed that the teen wouldn’t even know that his/her stop has just passed and the next stop would be a 30 minute stretch, but even on alighting on the next stop [ not sure if his/her eyes would open by then], he /she would have to wait an hour to get the return train back, and that would account to a total loss of 30 mts + 60 mts + 30 mts = 120 mts, plus the time it would take to commute back home from station.
Somebody once said, “He who does not know that value of an hour, apparently has not yet learned the value of life”.
The question is not that the teen has wasted 120 mts of his/her life, but the concern is that if this very attitude were to be taken forward and adopted in all walks of life, then what would be the success level of the teen in making through life.
It is important to understand, just as tiny droplets make up an Ocean, likewise, these tiny slips will eventually be the characteristic of the young man or young woman in the life way ahead.
APPS users and Procrastination
If there be one evil which amounts for the maximum failures of individuals, be it with their career or their health, it would be Procrastination.
Your friend says, “Jason, you need to start walking a mile from today, to address your weight issues, and Jason, says, “Yes, I know, let me head home, change and then catch you up on the road”
Jason, reaches his home, sips his coffee, feels that he needs to eat his pies, sits on his couch to enjoy them, then he gets a call from another friend reminding him of a ball game, Jason promptly calls this friend over, but with a reminder to walk in with a bucket of KFC and 3 cases of Beers.
By procrastination, Jason, just let his Blood pressure build up further and had to be rushed to the ER, at the end of the Ball game, the Beer and the KFC, were responsible for contributing Jason’s visit.
But this could have been avoided, had only Jason listened and taken the right action. But Jason, procrastinated.
Research suggests a strong correlation between Procrastination and I-Phone usage.
With the mind being constantly occupied, the need to deviate and shift the focus of the user from the game, to a pressing assignment submission would require more than a work from a Mortal.
Its a Struggle out there
With economy becoming tougher and tougher by the day and employers seeking for multiple talent skill set employees, the question to ask here would be, how many of the current day teens would be able to meet up to the expectations set by Market.
With dawning of the AI age, new skills are expected from employees and more so the time given to train and deliver would be even shorter.
Remember, all industries that generate money are Service based, in other words, Clients would always want to hear, “Sure”, “I got you covered”, “here you go”, “I can solve it in a minute”.
A Question to the Parents?
All these would mean, less time and more efficiency. The question to be asked here would be, are you providing an environment that would develop the children and the teens into versatile and dynamic individuals who are ready to take this world on?
Education APPs and how they destroy the Child’s creativity
Under the name of Education Apps, Parents of 10 year old are exposing their kid to mind muting educational methodologies.
There was a time, when Math teachers universally prohibited Children from using Solution Texts which were produced by independent authors for the prescribed text books.
These books had all the problems worked in with complete details, and all the student had to do would be to just open these books and simply go through the solution for any Home work question posed by the Math teacher.
Now, the reason for which Math teachers opposed the use of such “Solution texts’, is that they prevented the Children from applying their minds to solve questions analytically.
Now even if the problem was difficult, children who provided sufficient effort at working towards a solution, always received a reward of encouragement from the teacher.
How non Guide book [solution texts] users fared
In other words, the development of abilities of students who worked their way at Problems without the use of Guide texts were way higher than students who used Guide texts.
Th former students always thought outside the box. They had greater levels of imagination, they were not rote learners, they saw the world with a different perspective, they were high achievers, they were fearless in their pursuits and more so enjoyed freedom and abundant of life with a sense of feeling that the rest had no clue of.
Years later, when observing these students, we find that they have designed a world of their own, with independence and security.
How Guide book users fared
But those, who resorted to the use of these Guide Texts, always had a narrower view of the world. They were grade centered, and feared to do anything out of the set principles given to them.
Fear ruled them, and they were more of a Conformist in their approaches. They were good in executing a formula to a jot but never moved beyond the point of using creativity to write one’s own formula.
Most of the students on this league, did find lucrative jobs, but their jobs required hard and back breaking performances to ensure that they continued on it. There was no freedom for them; they ought to sweat it out every day for the month’s pay.
How APPs Made things worse
We begins to question now, why all these changed, the rigidity of the school system, the teaching methodologies, the teachers insights, and so on.
Today we see, top international schools advising students to go APP based. In fact, many teachers are assigning homework through the use of Social media and the student is left with no choice when it comes to getting their queries answered.
Many of these assignments would require some level of support based questions to be answered by teachers and in many cases, students will have varied level of requirements when it comes to seeking clarifications.
Now, since questions are featured in Group Chats, most of the students would not even pose a doubt on the Group Chat. For two main reasons, given the age and time we are living in, no student would want to be ridiculed for being a Nerd.
Secondly, on the other side, no student would want to be called a dummy for venturing on the first place to ask the most obvious question as clarification.
So, the end result, every student simply goes through the process with no learning Occurring.
“Process” takes a Back seat
There are two ways a student can be accessed, one would be Objectively, and the other would be Subjectively. Objective questions would only require you to Opt for a choice, the student is not required to show any detailed process for the question asked.
However, for Subjective questions, a student should provide the necessary working for the questions. The knowledge provided from the student side would largely go towards measuring the student’s abilities irrespective of the final answer being correct or incorrect.
Subjective questions are a clear indicator of the student’s domain knowledge, where as Objective type questions, would examine the Students Speed and rapid thinking abilities.
Though most Objective type questions would only require the student to Pick the right choice, but picking the right choice would in turn be possible only if the student has obtained the complete working knowledge of the Topic which is being examined.
In other words, the student’s performance in Objective as well as in Subjective tests would in turn depend on the expanse in which he or she had mastered the subject. This, every student is aware off.
When APPs are used to Examine Students
But what happens when a student merely takes test using an APP? the consequences are disastrous.
For all APPs are designed with a Binary code, which would return either a “0” or a “1”, depending on the choice made. In other words, a student has no way to validate his or her responses based on the exhaustive detail he or she is capable of providing if mandated.
But on the contrary, since a score is what an eventual outcome is from the APP, and more so, since details for the questions is neither mandatory nor the APPs have the ability to validate them, students most often, simply follow the rote leaning technique to gather and reproduce the answers.
This conditioning is makes students lazy plus does not promote Creativity. It is imperative to understand, the brain works only when Challenged.
With times ahead becoming tougher by the day, the Brain, just like the muscle of the body, grows only when challenged. If environment available only promotes the ease of life, then both the body and mind threads a path of decay and stagnation which would eventually lead to failure and misery.
All growth is upstream, drifting is downstream. Keep APPs out of Children Education. Use of APPs is Child abuse- Child care Educator
