Much of the education of most children is first gained incidentally. Attitudes and values are picked up from parents and peers within the home and social environment. The child learns a lot through unstructured observations, without explicit instruction. This incidental learning is enriched by mass communication methods, newspapers, radio, television, and so on. Then comes the institutionalized formal education.

Anthropologists and sociologists have given attention to incidental learning in non-technological societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Nothing like it, or almost, has emerged in the Western World. Everywhere today there is the tendency to regard institutionalised education as the major if not the sole instrument for the education of our children.

The process of change in societies in the past was imperceptibly slow, so that there was not much need to invent ways of catering for the education of our youngsters to help them face the demands of their surroundings. There was not much strain or stress either on incidental or formal education. Nowadays the rate of change is accelerating with cataclysmic speed. This phenomenon is having an impact on educational processes, while at the same time the very structure of the family is being disrupted. In the non-technological society of the past there was a continuing intimacy between the young and their parents, peers and neighbourhood. The child grew up learning largely by imitation rather than in an explicit verbal abstract manner.

By contrast, this intimacy in today?s society is increasingly disrupted. Very often the mother separates herself at the earliest opportunity because of her professional career, whereas the father may be working away from home for considerable periods of time. The lives of both parents and children are directed towards what we term a success-oriented society.

The nature of education, whether incidental or institutionalised, should be directed towards equipping the young with the ability to establish themselves in a great variety of relationships that the increasingly complex structure of this new society will generate for them. Yet, there exists one element in our institutions within this complex and ever demanding society, that I would term ?dehumanising?.

Our institutionalised processes of education are dominated to such an extent by curriculum development and the reduction of the labour intensive element in education, that we often do not realise that the most important feature of school education in human terms is the pupil-teacher relationship.

Children as quantitative terms

?Despite the fact that millions of children and thousands of adults are daily pressed into a student-teacher relationship, we know little about their inter-actions and what influences they have on each other. ?Does the teacher?s relationship with the child have the intimacy necessary for intellectual growth or is it a dull, contractual one which offers non-learning as much as it does learning? (John Holt : How Children Fail, Pitman Publishing Co. New York 1964 p.x)

The concern subsequent to the above quotation reflects the fact that whatever be the teaching and learning methods brought about in our schools, the pupil-teacher relationship is of crucial importance in the upbringing of children. In addition to the highly laudable introduction of improved educational material and equipment, there is certainly the equal need for establishing better knowledge and understanding of what the child needs for his educational development in ?human? terms. So much time and energy is spent in attempting to examine the content and methodology of formal education.

I think it is time to also give as much sympathetic consideration to the child?s reactions to the conditions in which we attempt to provide his education. We have to acknowledge that in general far too little attention is given to what goes on in the hearts and minds of the children.

Education planners and teachers decide upon the curriculum content and how it shall be delivered. Their decisions are often based upon certain assumptions regarding knowledge and skill requirement, and the conditions in which the teaching is to take place. The latter is decided in terms of buildings, teaching materials and the like. The children are considered in quantitative terms; what numbers will be required with skills appropriate for the satisfying of projections of man power needs etc. Little consideration is given of the child as an individual member of a family living in a particular socio-economic environment. Poverty, the broken home, social and familial conditions in which the child is living, the school atmosphere, have all to be taken into consideration.

In ignoring the conditions in which children live, curriculum planners can only make a mockery of the best educational intentions. If there is the least element of insecurity at school and home, that strikes across the harmony of home and school, then all the concern of the content of education will be of little worth.

A few children among the strong in will and spirit will succeed despite adversity. But the majority will flounder, come to terms with a vague misery of acceptance, or would be frustrated, resentful if not rebellious, and therefore potentially disruptive in their attitudes to society.

Andre WAN CHOW WAH Associate Professor