Parents, teachers should encourage curiosity and autonomy in children

The opening of classes for basic education is fast approaching, and both parents and teachers are busy making plans and preparations for the children’s first days of school.

With the present upsetting state of our educational system, all stakeholders in education must feel accountable to do their part in lowering the extremely high percentage of our country’s learning poverty. Despite some resistance to assuming teaching responsibilities, we still believe that parents have the best productivity potentials to help the Department of Education in its monumental task. Parents, unquestionably, are capable to support teachers in maximizing the development of our children’s learning potential. After all, they are not only their children’s first but should be their lifetime teachers.

In this era of information technology, children who prosper are those who become independent learners at an early age and have learned to master life-long learning skills. They become adept, too, in learning the soft skills mostly required in the workplace today. But prior to learning these skills, there are prerequisite skills that parents may encourage to develop or simply teach to their children. Two of these prerequisites are curiosity and autonomy, which can be taught and developed simultaneously, in the home or in the classroom. As we satisfy children’s curiosity, they eventually learn how to answer their own questions and become independent thinkers, and vice versa. When we give them more freedom to explore, they widen their perspectives, making their curiosity grow and learning a never-ending process.

Grade school children are full of curiosity, always asking questions about anything that comes to their minds. They are curious because they want to understand the world around them. Parents and other adults in the family must recognize that curiosity is a skill that should be both satisfied and encouraged if they want their children to cultivate a love for learning. Curious children may be allowed to do active but safe exploration to discover new knowledge on their own. Given such autonomy, smart kids usually end up with creative outputs and inventions that provide them with a sense of accomplishment and triumph, eliciting a hunger for more explorations.

In feeding the child’s curiosity, adults need not explain everything. It is helpful and safer to answer children’s confusing questions by just sharing one’s ideas while avoiding biases and prejudiced conclusions unless they need factual answers. More important than giving all the answers is to ask what they think about their questions and why they are interested in asking them. Their responses will be a good jumping board for a longer and more meaningful conversation which may lead to coming up with their own conception of the best answers to their questions. It’s a kind of learning experience that both child and parent will enjoy and treasure, aside from being an indirect approach to teaching the life skills of communication, critical thinking, decision-making, and relationship building.

Believing that education is a joint responsibility of the home and school, parents can think of hundreds of things they can do to support their children’s learning. From the simple daily conversations, they can do activities together, either for pleasure or educational gains—playing computer games, cooking/baking, gardening, story reading/telling, problem-solving, etc.—to jointly writing a story, composing short poems, video making, vlogging, and more. With the abundance and continuous growth of technological resources, there is no end to what a parent and child/children can do together in the practice of life-long learning. Indeed, there is no reason for learning poverty to happen in any country if only its adult citizens love their children and care enough for their future.

FLORENCIA C.

DOMINGO, Ph.D.,

retired schools superintendent,[email protected]