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John Mason says that schools should encourage the reading habit if they want students to think for themselves.

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About 200 teachers from schools around the city had gathered at an English language training workshop recently where, pen and paper in hand, they turned into attentive students for the day. Their ‘teacher’ at the workshop organised by Oxford University Press was John Mason. The iconic academician, who has spent the past four decades teaching at La Martiniere for Boys, and then helming St James School, Modern High School, Dubai, and Doon School, Dehra Dun, was back in Calcutta to share literature, language and lifestyle-related concerns surrounding students with junior colleagues.

“Calcutta has got the most language-sensitive teachers,” Mason said, settling into a sofa in his hotel at the end of the day’s work. “I must comment on their depth of understanding and appreciation of new methods of teaching and innovation.” Mason was clearly happy with his ‘students’.

Teachers of language, Mason pointed out, were at a unique advantage. “Language is a wonderful opportunity to enrich the child’s entire being. His capacity to imagine, his perceptions — all come through the vehicle of language.” This is why when he is not writing text books, Mason spends his time interacting with teachers. “I try to get past the mechanistic ways of learning and into more creative ways to reach out to the child.”

With children taking up guns on the Indian campus as well, Mason admitted a crisis of values in contemporary times. This problem, he feels, can be addressed by encouraging the habit of reading. “A good reader is a life-long learner. Efficiency of a student in reading is linked to his intellectual growth.”

Yet reading, he lamented, gets attention only in the primary classes. “We do not give importance to reading in middle school, unlike in the West. This is why the majority has a lack of confidence to read and research on their own and depends on notes from teachers to draft out answers. I place this failure at the door of neglected competencies, the most significant of which is reading.”

Mason quoted a directive from the National Curriculum Framework 2005 devised by the National Council of Education and Research Training (NCERT) that asks schools to concentrate only on language and numbers in classes I and II. “When skills are supposed to be developed, instead, unfortunately, there is a clutter of subjects.”

Mason suggested that schools form a reading policy so that the subject teacher does not remain the sole source of information. “The onus of learning should be transferred to the kid. The NCERT also wants that the students be given a chance to develop their own knowledge. This should be the base for them.”

Mason recalled how at the workshop many teachers had complained that children were disinclined to write. “This happens because they are not encouraged to express their feelings. If they are good at speaking the language it is because spoken English is so much more accessible to them through television, which is a medium pleasurable to children. Thus they develop a faculty that is efficient but largely informal.”

But it is not enough for Indian children to learn one language well. Pushed towards mastering a foreign tongue, children in many urban homes are becoming weak in their mother tongue. On being posed the problem, Mason had a homegrown solution to offer. One of the ways to preserve their bilingual faculties is through conversation at home. “I know of families which sit and talk after dinner where each member revives the day’s happenings.”

This not only strengthens the family bond but also builds a child’s confidence in the mother tongue. “But this family concord is a rarity today and the after-dinner conversation is replaced by time spent in silence in front of the television. In case of houses with one TV set, the family is at least assembled in the same room; in those with two TV sets, the breakdown of the concord is final,” Mason signed off.

Sources: The Telegraph (Kolkata, India)