With reference to this, I believe this is a short term solution to a bigger social issue …minimal or zero resilience amongst human beings .By issuing such guidelines the institute is protecting the interest of one group of students but there is simmering anger and emotional turbulence among another bigger group of students who have not found place inside the institute or the ones who have not got their desired stream .Who is taking care of them, who is counselling them before allowing them to integrate into the society . If they are allowed to find their way in the society ,they are likely to park this anger deeper inside them and take revenge when they find their teeth…this may be a decade or more later also. Shouldn’t we have a bigger support system in place to support the ones who are inside the campus and those who missed their seat and are going through the same emotional disturbance .Students through school curriculum should be sensitized to two different things –one self-resilience to face and handle all kinds of discrimination through-out their life, the second one is to accommodate other less privileged people in all spheres. This means that if your good looks allows you to have a great digital presence in the personal grooming space, you should also be accommodative to the needs of another person with average looks who wants to establish their digital presence in the personal grooming space. Through extensive role plays, moral stories and exemplary demonstrations, right in their primary school days students from all strata of the society must be taught to celebrate diversity. Gender sensitization, Equality of pay,environmental concerns etc are not concepts that can be suddenly ingrained at college level through a week of celebration,taking photographs and uploading them. The money spend on these activities needs to be directed else where.
The need of the hour is to inculcate socio-emotional learning or SEL in school curriculum. SEL involves engaging students in learning experiences that build knowledge, skills and mind sets needed to succeed academically as well as to develop and maintain healthy social relationships, have good mental health. With no empirical evidence for an effective SEL program the framework proposed by CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning) seems to be close bet.
CASEL research proposes that the building of knowledge, skills, and mindsets across five key competencies is essential:
1. Self-awareness
2. Self-management
3. social awareness
4. Relationship skills
5. responsible decision making
Can we start this with Anganwadi?
Can the government appoint content creators and curators to develop stories, movies to be shown to develop these qualities in children? Can we teach them these five qualities along with alphabets and addition?. Source
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