Pressing need for positive education and positive teaching

"Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace". –This remark of Confucius looks has lost its credibility when we become aware of that today education has failed to breed confidence and hope in children. It is very saddening to pay heed to the self-killing of Bharath a fourth-year engineering student of Lovely university of Punjab and native of Tadipatri by leaving a leave letter to his near and dear. He has forgotten about his all past accomplishments and feared about future objectives. The contents of his last leave letter and his advice to his mates make the entire parent tribe think and judge how their wards pressurized by their whims and fancies. In his letter, he made it clear he had no issues like love failure and courage is a prerequisite for committing suicide. He also appealed his mates "don't be aloof in rooms try to spend at least an hour outside of the room". This reflects that suicides of the highly educated are due to the solitude and lack of recreation.

It is a well-known fact that all parents want the best for their children. They sacrifice a lot for the development and happiness of their children. But finding the right education model for their children has become a big challenge. The education today we are providing to the children is not making them flourish in values, respect relationships, accept challenges, and gluttonous to succeed. It seems that the existing education system is effortlessly trying to realize the remark of Will Durant "Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance".

This is the right time to think about which is the right model of education for our society that is multiracial and still is in the grip of irrational thought. Further, in plain sight education should have to bring peace in society but in our country, it hasn't. So it is essential we need to focus our attention on positive education. It is an amalgam of traditional educational principals and research-backed ways of increasing happiness and mental well-being. This positive education concept has introduced by Martin Seligman who is the founders of positive psychology to decrease depression among the student tribe and to increase mental health and well-being. He has incorporated this concept with the PERMA model and with the support of VIA (values in action).

PERMA model will focus on positive emotions such as joy, gratitude, interest, and hope and engage the child to involve in challenging activities. It will also promote the Positive relationships that are exhausted due to the technological explosion. Further, it will also instill confidence by making the child that his beliefs are bigger than himself. This model will also pay its attention to the child accomplishments and makes him to more prone towards success and achieve mastery over it.

The values in action model (VIA) will mainly focus on nurturing the external abilities like wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, transcendence. It is sure that with these models the child will become a rational being and bring peace into the society. We are well aware that today's education is concentrating on only cognitive abilities and making the child more informative.

The contemporary classroom has become more elusive than enlightening for the students. That is the reason still in this digital era school in India is a cage for the children and pressuring him during his schooling. It is a good attempt made by the states like Delhi, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh to introduce the Bhutanese model of education for the mental health and well-being of the student tribe with the name of happiness curriculum. We need to watch and wait for its impact and outcomes on the children and society.

The positive education is not only for the students but also for the teachers because the well –being of the teacher will promote the well-being of the students. So, the management should have to take all measures to promote the well-being of the teachers that leads to positive teaching. It was well said by Albert Einstein "It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken in creative expression and joy".

So, the state education research councils and teacher education institutions should have to design their curriculum for positive teaching. It is an ill-conceived fact that there is much disparity between the training and ground reality for the teachers. The pedagogical psychology that has learned in the training has no relevance in the classroom. This is making both the teacher and taught as unemotional during the learning process.

This situation must be changed in teacher education and the school and classroom atmosphere should encourage the teacher tribe to render their services according to the inputs received in the training with more passion. This mode of teaching won't pressurise the child but encourage the same to learn at his own pace.

It was well said by Plato "Bodily exercise when compulsory does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind "So it is not a good practice for both the parents and to the teachers to pressurise the child to obtain the knowledge against his wishes. It is hoped that the governments will take initiative to bring the changes to arrest the self-killing of future hope by incorporating positive education that will make every individual flourish. Forget not the remark of G.K.Chesterton" Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another"