Art is an expression of our inner thought process and reflects upon our intellect, philosophy, and mental health. But when art is expressed by innocent children, then it transforms into divinity as it pours out of the sacred heart of the innocent little angels. Casa Dei Bambini Montessori Kolkata has successfully organized an art workshop for their little celebrity artists who demonstrated their monumental talents through the use of paints and brushes. These videos capture those precious moments bringing tears of joy to us all. It is a reflection of our childhood captured in a time capsule.
Children are a generation of unimaginable opportunities and talents that we often fail to recognize as adults. Our focus has always been on the wrong side of what we perceive as EDUCATION in India. That simply includes mugging by overloading information from various sources, vomiting them on our exam sheets to the best of our abilities, achieving high grades, and capturing high-salary jobs! This century-old rickety education philosophy of India fails to recognize the individual needs, talents, special characters, and learning abilities of our precious children who represent the next generation of our future citizens. By molding everyone in the same model we only generate a mediocre workforce to sustain our economy and society, but not to produce talents or brilliance in our academia.
The education of our little children coming to our Montessori and Nursery schools is almost taken for granted. We put very little or no emphasis on really shaping the minds of our new generations. We only target academic mediocrity but not academic excellence. Our basic concept for excellence is simply MEMORIZATION and nothing else. But if we look behind this we could find treasures in stimulating the little children to excel through their introduction to arts abs crafts, songs and plays, puppetry, and related tools to make them enriched with positive sociocultural experiences and life skills as well as ethics, morality and an overall value system to create better human beings.
Just simply think about how challenging it is to explain the delicate issues of our fragile ecology and ecosystem to little children and make them sensitive and appreciative of Mother Nature. But if we use arts and crafts, songs, classroom plays, games, and puppetry or magic shows we could very easily penetrate the world of the children through color, shape, sizes, words, and phrases; and motivate them to bring the best out of them. It facilitates the children to think positively and stimulate their imagination to the next level. Providing them with such a platform instead of memorization is a unique opportunity to inculcate and cultivate the innovative brilliant minds of thousands of our little talents that go unnoticed every day.
Dr. Sima Mukhopadhyay has designed numerous puppetry shows both for kids and adults across the state of West Bengal. Her four decades of enriched experiences have rekindled the minds of thousands and helped them appreciate complex concepts disseminated through her monumental puppetry work. Currently, she has been closely collaborating with Ms. Santwana Basu, Director of the Cassa Dei Bambini (CDB) Montessori Kolkata to try new approaches for enriching children's education through alternative and holistic approaches. Both of them have been using puppetry, songs, and drama as new and innovative teaching media together with arts and crafts to help them express their inner self without any inhibition.
Dr. Mukhopadhyay said, “I have mostly used puppetry for the education of adults in the mass education programs, and was worried about exploring this approach of teaching the kids.” However, her experience as an educator in communicating with children through puppetry, dance, drama, and songs has been phenomenal. She added, “….the overwhelming support I received from Ms. Basu and her teaching staff at CDB together with encouragement from the parents boosted my courage. The response received from the children has been rewarding through their repeated claps, yells, and shouts of appreciation. The messages and the content were well received and they were able to clearly retain the content even a few days post-class indicating their effortless and enjoyable learning. I am also learning with them at the same time. The experience has green been so rewarding for me.”
Ms. Santwana Basu, Director (CDB) said, “ I have been thinking about highlighting the use of arts and crafts, songs, drama, and puppetry to facilitate child education at the Montessori level for quite some time. I have been experimenting and evolving my holistic strategies for early childhood education using multiple media. But the collaboration with Dr. Mukhopadhyay has been a catalyst in using them directly in our open-air classes for better education, and engagement as well as in better understanding and comprehensively analyzing our tiny clients. The hugely positive response that I received from the children and their parents as well from both my teaching and non-teaching staff has further encouraged me to use such a holistic approach to enrich the sociology-cultural and educational experiences of our students.”
Ms. Sutapa Bardhan, the Secretary of a Kolkata-based NGO called ECHO (Educational Counselling and Helping Organization) said that she was thrilled with the rich experience. She mentioned, “We have attempted the same approach for government-aided schools in the district of Kolkata ……..at the middle and high school levels; and the response has been monumental…….We organized a few workshops on pollinator conservation, forest, wildlife and biodiversity conservation, wildlife trafficking, and illegal trade on wildlife as well as various wildlife body parts, a series on the life of eminent Indian scientists and social workers, and different challenging social issues…..All these workshops using the holistic educational approach by integrating classroom lectures with arts and crafts, puppetry, dance, drama, and songs were positively received by the target student communities at both levels in English and vernacular media.” She indicated using such approaches more frequently for school education as the reception as well as student retention were significantly high compared to conventional classroom-based teacher-directed lectures. Ms. Tilottoma Dey a business entrepreneur and an active member of ECHO suggested “We need to change the teacher-oriented education system into a student-friendly education system for getting better results.”
“We look forward to such new and enriched educational practices, that were not previously available for our kids at the preschool level” mentioned Ms, Jayita Chaki a mother of a first-year college student and a homemaker who also faced the challenges of conventional education. Prof. Sheuli Dasgupta of the Department of Microbiology, Gurudas College, Kolkata said, “ We need to explore such innovative teaching practices for college and university level students to enrich their classroom experiences”. She mentioned that her feelings have been that students at the tertiary level of education are also overloaded with information; and for them to think critically and apply the knowledge acquired successfully holistic educational approaches should be investigated seriously.