Today’s adults will not remain tomorrow. But today’s adults will, through their contribution in moulding the new world and their children’s values, attitudes, ideas and ideals, survive in the future. Today’s children are tomorrow’s future. TV anchors are shrill reporting corruption and violence, the newspapers spill blood in your family room daily, and the moral fibre of the world is cracking under psycho-social degradation. Situations cannot be wished away overnight. Change of this nature is evolutionary. It happens slowly in time. One has to begin by training our children in fresh new ways of thinking, with a new inspiration and new ideas. As Tagore writes: “Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit, into that heaven of freedom, Father, let my country awake.”
This is not achieved merely by changing school curriculum, or intellectuals blabbering in coffee shops about transforming political ideology, nor by academics crying hoarse about value based education in schools. Children do not learn from books, they learn from parental looks. If a child grows up watching the father using foul language, watch it, you will soon see the son pattern himself on it. If the father smokes, the child will play-act his father by rolling up a paper and pretending to smoke, saying “See, see, I am Daddy.” Medical science is now waking up to prenatal education. What has been the helpless embryo’s prenatal education? Films, videos, and magazines that serve sex, violence to make their money, sadly, at the expectant mother’s cost.
Prarthna Saran, President Chinmaya Mission Delhi.
Email: prarthnasaran@gmail.com
