Nowadays, many parents are committing a fundamental mistake, while getting their children enrolled in schools. They are giving importance to schools that focus only on academics and ignore all extracurricular activities. Of course, academics are very much necessary for the students to have a successful career, in the future. But many other activities are also significant during the formative years of a child, for their overall development.
An educational institution where the emphasis is solely on academic subjects and marks has several drawbacks affecting the proper growth of a child.
- In these schools, the students are continuously subjected to severe pressure, to make them secure good scores. Many children won’t be able to handle so much stress and over a period of time, it impacts their physical and mental health.
- These institutions disregard the fact that every child has a different talent and that they need to be encouraged accordingly. Instead, they use a single benchmark to assess all students. Here, the kids whose areas of interest are sports or other activities are left behind. Due to lack of right guidance, they lose self-confidence and go on to develop mental blocks that seriously hinder their growth in life.
- Generally, in such schools, the teacher-student ratio is abnormally high. There are too many students per class. Here, the rationale of the school management is clear: more the students and more will be the high grades. The institution uses these grades to project itself as a place where children get the best. In this process, the children are the sufferers. The kids are deprived of individual attention from teachers; there is no healthy teacher-student interaction.
- There are no activities other than studies in such schools. Thus, the child is deprived of opportunities to acquire useful traits such as teamwork, empathy, and working in coordination with others. These things can’t be developed when the focus is only on academic subjects, exams, and marks.
- The students of these schools are unable to develop the skills and knowledge required to face several real-life situations. They run the risk of getting confronted by numerous issues. These matters can easily be handled had the individual been educated in schools that concentrated on the all-round growth of kids.
Guidelines for parents
Parents have to make sure that their children get educated in schools where they grow in all aspects. Here are some key guidelines for parents.
- Before enrolling the child, the parents need to visit the school and interact with the students, teachers, and the staff. Most importantly, they should make it a point to speak to people whose kids are already studying in the school. This gives a clear picture. We get to know whether the school’s curriculum also includes extracurricular activities, too.
- Parents should not think that a school charging an exorbitant fee is the best one by default. Mostly, a decision taken with this viewpoint turns out to be detrimental for the children. They end-up in institutions where the child has nothing apart from academic subjects and exams.
- One should not forget that Academic – centric schools usually fail to impart ethical values in kids.