PRINCIPAL'S MESSGAGE

Dear MHS family,

Greetings of peace and joy to each one of you!

God’s sound decision to give humankind a mind, an intellect, to think, to speak thoughts and then to transform the latter into a story has developed and multiplied from myths and legends, folktales and fairytales, to the theories and treatises on developments in every sphere of life. One such story that is still evolving is the story of education.  

Evolutions thus led to revolutions. Revolutions in science and technology have successfully taken place, from the power and use of steam to the benefits of electricity, to the amazing use of electronics and the Internet, and finally, to the wonders of automation and artificial intelligence. Through time, each one has affected and will continue to affect education, careers, employment, and the progress and development of individual societies and countries.

Our world is changing rapidly. Yet in India the concept of the character of education remains antediluvian. The demand for education has increased; yet the supposedly widespread education is only on paper, using old and tattered regulations and methods. This insular approach fosters frustration among the teachers and the taught, as it is largely academic and textbook oriented, with desks and rows and pin-drop silence, all of which are certainly redundant in this century of global education.

Children born in the twenty-first century are better evolved. They are adept at technology, upwardly mobile, have a wide avenue for honing learning skills and a wider range of career choices. But this evolution has also brought with it a kind of personal backwardness, because these young ones are totally self-immersed and unable to manage their time and resources, have skewed value systems and suffer terrible emotional imbalances, with the failure to understand their culture and the realities of life in their own geographical spheres. This presents a humungous challenge that today’s parents, elders and educators are ill-equipped to handle. Hence, parents absolve themselves with fear by consistently indulging their wards and living in denial, while elders and educators tire themselves by trying to instil the laws of nature and culture and of decent human behaviour. It is a time of great struggle.

This is an age of information and vast understanding of the world and its diversities. Children in our schools want to spend time in a tinkering shed on the games’ courts, to think outside the box, to criticise, to create, to form unified groups and to form effective solutions. To some extent technology has made it possible for them to harness, analyse, evaluate and signify their efforts. Therefore, parents and teachers must be prepared to create curiosity, to nurture and sustain it through motivation, guidance and adjacent learning. This will lead to winning challenges through meaningful engagement, understanding the mindset and psyche, and using our intuition to foster creativity to select relevant approaches for helping this generation to evolve into responsible adults.

Students today are knitted together out of different strands of inheritance, environment, country and culture, one that is called a global village. Please understand this and think twice before you flex a tongue to criticise. The school today is doing its best in the balancing act of working with the twenty-first century child within the given framework of national norms, societal expectations and stringent adherence to the affiliated boards. Have patience and hope that our education system will evolve to the new aspirations of one and all.

This edition of The Quisqualis will give you a tiny glimpse at the children’s efforts at learning anew. Wherever you are in disagreement with their exposures, try to remember that experiences are an opportunity to begin anew. It is this that helps humans drift from stagnation to success. I leave you with this thought.

John F. Kennedy once said, ‘Challenge is the law of life and those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.’

Long live our MHS, and God bless each one of you!

Y. Cabral