Don’t let your children grow with job-centric mindset

By Sushil Mungekar

With schools reopening after a long silence of 19 months and all boards formally declaring offline board exams, the entire nation is deeply infected by ‘examina-virus’. We all parents, educators, teachers and schools start putting our children, right from grade 1 to 12, into a ‘pressure cooker’. All TV remote controls & cell phones get locked in the locker, newspapers are banned, outings are cut to zero and all eyes are focused on “kitna milega?”. While some students have woos of passing the exams, some aspire to achieve better marks than their previous scores, few want to secure their ranks. What is consistent among all these is the unhealthy ‘pressure of achievement’.

Over the last few years, the pressure to perform in examinations and obsession of marks/grades are being criticized and rightly so. However, the needle has not moved beyond that. And that’s primarily because these are symptoms and not the real disease. At the core of it, it’s our job centric mindset which pushes us to force our children to obtain better marks in examinations and ‘secure’ better careers. Careers are defined in the form of jobs that they would get after getting their degrees. Better marks result in getting admissions at better colleges/ universities and courses which are ultimately measured in terms of jobs they yield for our children.  This has gravitated to a level where parents start aligning their aspirations of possible jobs for their children right at the school levels and make sure that they put them in the ‘slots’.

Aspiring to get good jobs is not bad, but nurturing children with a job centric mindset is.

1. Nurturing a child to build a better career is one of the, and not the only, objectives of school education. Pursuing a career, be it job, profession, self-employment or entrepreneurship, is just one part of their life that they would settle with their lives. They also need to be groomed as responsible consumers, avid purchasers, smart investors, good managers of human relations, active social citizens and giver back to society. Unfortunately, today’s school education and parents’ upbringing don’t put enough effort into making our children prepared to manage these multiple roles as they grow. These are left to their own experiences, native skills and interpretations. However successful they would be in their careers, if they don’t build abilities to play these multiple roles, they would not be able to live happy lives.

2. The ‘future of jobs’ and ‘jobs of future’ are changing very fast. Research indicates that 62% of today’s jobs won’t exist by 2025 and 85% of jobs of 2030 are not even known yet. With these glaring uncertainties, it would be impossible to prepare students for jobs of the future, today. It is imperative that we cannot be contended by giving them knowledge & skills of the careers as they appear fit today, but also build capacities & competencies to manage uncertainties and changes in these careers in the future. Thus, the focus on life skills of 2030 becomes very critical.

3. One life – one career is also a myth that needs to be blown off. It would be a great injustice to imagine that the generation studying in school today will be wedded to just one career throughout their lives. Even if we consider a span of 60 years of working for them, they would certainly look at multiple careers, completely different to each other not only sequentially, but in parallel as well.

4. Lastly, but most importantly, school is the place and point in the lifetime of a child to realize their native skills, reflect on their self and identify their areas of passion. We, as parents and educators, knowingly or unknowingly, try to force fit them to ‘successful’ careers as per our perceptions of the future and   often don’t do adequate justice to what they like and what they have.  If we build a systematic process for students to identify their passion and strengthen their capabilities to build careers in those areas, then they would be able to carve out a great path for themselves, making them achieve ‘success’, be at their ‘best’ and live a ‘happy’ life.

(The author is Founder & CEO, Enpower. Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of Financial Express Online.)

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