Monday, January 12, 2009

Creating an Inquiring mind?

Creating an inquiring mind is an essential part of the good parenting, we would make our kids a better person by inculacating the habit of inquiring about what they see, hear, rather than simply leaving it off & not understand about it.

Try this first on yourself, for a week or so - increase your level of concentration on the items you observe from dawn to dusk, make sure to keep a sheet of paper handy to note down about all the new things you observe around in the day. Either the same day end or the next day, go look-up about every new thing you observed & understand about it, by asking few simple questions:

1. What is this ______ ?
2. How does this work?
3. Why is this important to me, people around or universe?

end of one week, you would at least learn dozen new things that you did not know in the past, it's also possible one of them could influence the way you go about in the daily life / make you feel better / excited!

Now, go back 20yrs & imagine if you had this habit built into you? don't you think, it would have helped you know more about things around you, about the world? and in-turn make better decisions about your studies, career, family, nature?

Would this make your kid brilliant, may be or may be not - I'm not prescribing to make your kid the brightest kid around in the block or school, but it would make him a better human being and have an ability to think about something before making decisions.

Does our education system teach this habit? - To my knowledge there are very few schools that probably inculcate this culture, current education system is on a "race" mode, where they want to have more of their students getting the best grades in final exams & want to have as much information filled into the kids brain to output on the exam sheet... that they miss out to feed for the future. It's like kids are educated by giving them a fish everyday, instead of teaching them to fish themselves!

Does this start at school or at home? - kids first school is home & learn by seeing others... best place for the kid to start this culture is at home, unless you as parent practice this - expecting this by your son / daughter to do this is tough.

-Bhaskara