How should learning and teaching take place between a student and a teacher? Do you think it’s possible for a teacher to learn from his or her students?
I marvel at the fact that my students are grateful to me when I am in fact grateful to them. To be a teacher you have to be a learner; the day you stop learning you are out. To be a teacher you have to learn new and new methods to ‘connect’ and ‘correct’ students. Children need to be shown connections between ideas and for that the teachers need to see the connections themselves. They must also be able to make corrections very deftly. Moreover, if the teacher cannot make connections of the present world to the child’s life, the learning will be hampered. For the child to enter class and realise that his/her own life, culture and language is of no consequence in the classroom, where s/he is only being demanded to write things which are of no consequence to him/her in copies, it will be difficult to retain things. And then we expect the child to remain interested! Teachers should accept that they are apprentices to any body of knowledge that they are teaching to the learner. Teachers should have the ‘lets learn together’ approach, and should admit that they are also students of the same subject, only they learnt some of it a few years earlier then the students. Teachers should be open to the idea that there yet might be a better way of doing things. When the learner sees this approach of the teacher, a whole new dynamics emerges and a new relationship takes place between the teacher and learner.

We’ve spoken about students and we’ve spoken about teachers, lets now come to parents. How can parents facilitate learning at home? What should parents keep in mind when creating a learning environment at home for their children?
Many parents ask me about which school to put their children and I tell them, “please don’t worry about the reputation of the school. The distance is a bigger problem.” Don’t make your children leave the house at 6:30 in the morning for school starting at 8:00 AM and make them come back home at 3:30 PM for classes finishing at 1:00 PM. That will make a child hate learning for the rest of his/her life no matter what you do. You pack off a child to school, cold tired, and possibly hungry so early in the morning and make him/her come back so late in the afternoon, and you expect him not to have a lack of concentration or problems such as anemia? Put the child in a school closer to home, regardless of its reputation or lack of - that should not be the issue.

The issue is creating an atmosphere at home where a child can learn. People say, “my child doesn’t read.” My reply to them is “when do they see you read?” Children imitate. When they don’t see a parent read, why do you expect them to pick up a book? Any house which has 50 books in it will have children which go to university. This might be a categorical statement, but it is a fact! And by books I mean any kind of informative reading material. If there is DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) time at home, times of silences when the TV is switched off and everyone reads – there will be learning.