Bob Kisiki
Chances are you are still stuck with your child at home — not because you lack the money to take them back to school, but because they just won’t accept to go back there.
They feel that the season passed, and they want to move on to something else. Something more practical. And oh, I contrived the use of that word “practical” deliberately, because that’s what we will end up talking about for most of this article.
All the time they have been out of school, our children have been living life in other ways. They have been relating with peers; they have been watching movies and television programmes and series and video games; they have been reading books and doing a lot besides.
And the aggregate result of all this, done over the longest break they have had from school, has created people we might never have anticipated that they would become.
People who can face you and declare what they believe is good for themselves (and I’m not even saying this is a bad thing); people who probably no longer think that conventional school is their ordained path; people who have discovered other avenues life offers to the destinations they have set for themselves.
A friend told me his son had plainly told him, Papa, I am tired of waiting for school. I am not going back there, even if the Government should reopen learning institutions. He wanted to get into other things.
Even before the lockdown and its accompanying shenanigans danced its way onto our stage, this father had been having running battles with his son over academics. I hate this subject. That teacher doesn’t teach well, the food is horrible. I detest this or that. One thing after another…
Then someone told him, have you considered having your son do something he truly loves? For, there must surely be that one thing that makes him come alive. Have you thought of letting him go where he can do that? Now he had never considered that at all!
So he looked through the boy’s life and, indeed, there was something he could trace from when his son was a little toy-loving toddler. He was always tinkering about with everything he touched. Open up torches to see what lights them at the push of a little node. Break a pen and remove the nib, to see the ink flow out unhindered. Shake the hand-held transistor radio to see if the guys in there would feel too shaken to speak again.
And, as he grew older, he would try and fi x things that had broken down in the house. My friend knew just what his son loved to do. So he talked to the boy and, bless the Lord, the young man went all aglow with excitement. He wanted to go to technical school.
Now we have a problem in the country; people do not look at technical education as another route to the same destination, but as a reserve path for only those who cannot afford the expressway that leads to Gloryland… a path leading to some end-of-the-world shantytown somewhere.
So when you tell them to take their children where they can become motor vehicle mechanics or carpenters or whatever else, they look at you with that worried look that says, have you lost it, brother?
Yet those very people go and pay ugly millions to get classy furniture or have their Chevrolets fixed or to dine at top-range restaurants. And my friend’s son is doing great at school and his teachers are in awe.
And your child could be a great singer or good at playing an instrument; or loves cooking or whatever, and there are schools that can turn that passion into a career. Let those with ears hear…
The writer is a parenting counsellor and a teacher
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