Children Should Be Given Opportunity to Develop Insights

Childhood should not be just about going to school, mugging up lessons, scoring in exams, and winning prizes in competitions. The insights that children develop — that we consciously make them develop — become very important in life.

If you don’t want your child to be just another rat in the race, but to develop values and live a fruitful, worthy life, then you should give the child opportunities to develop such insights. They are not lessons that you teach; they are paths that you show, directions that you point to — following which, they discover themselves.

This is an incident from the childhood of Acharya Vinoba Bhave. Ideally, all these should be told to children directly — but it is a pity that even our parents do not know these. Unless parents develop awareness as to how to live, how will the children learn? It is from the parents — looking at the parents — that children learn how to live.

Vinoba was young. He saw some people breaking a big rock. They kept on hitting at it with hammers for quite some time. Vinoba was standing there, watching curiously.

They asked him, 'Do you want to break it? Wait.'

They continued. When the rock was just about to break, with one last stroke it would split — they gave him a hammer and said, 'Now you hit.'

With one hit from the child’s hand, the rock broke into two pieces. They yelled out, 'Vinya broke a rock! Vinya broke a rock!' It was a celebration. Vinya also felt happy.

But he saw something else in this.

All those people who delivered the thousand blows before him — they all went to the backstage. Only Vinoba’s name came up as the person who did it. The rest, who actually made it happen, disappeared from the scene. The celebration was: Vinya broke the rock.

This is what happens in the world.

Vinoba thought — there are those revered sages like Shankaracharya, who are famous for their knowledge. But aren’t their gurus greater than them? Then why is it that we don’t know them? We don’t even know their names. This is a fact of the world.

This insight, Vinoba developed.

We hear about great war heroes. But nobody talks about the cooks in the army camps who fed them, working day and night. It is the energy from the food they gave that enabled these heroes to perform and deliver. We forget this. We don’t even know these unsung heroes.

While our media highlights our great soldiers who have had to lay down their lives to protect the motherland, we don’t even think about the civilians who get killed in the border skirmishes. They are called civilian casualties.

Every life laid down for the motherland is important — equally important.

The soldiers know their importance. They know these are the people who risk their lives to provide them with vital information about the enemy. The soldiers very much care about them. They do everything possible to protect them.

It is us — our media — that does not find any sensation in this.

How did Vinoba get this important insight? That no success can be attributed to a single person. That there are so many people behind each success — without whom the success would not have happened. People who are not seen. Not considered.

Do you know how Vinoba got this insight? From the way his parents lived. The elders at home — how they acted in each situation. Seeing that, Vinoba was growing up. He learned how to look at life by watching them.

They pointed towards small, small events — which are mostly ignored and overlooked. They made him do small, small things. Get involved in small, small things. It was not a life of 'Study, don’t waste your time' for him.

We should involve children in everything — right from household chores to feeding birds, gardening, shopping, paying the milkman — everything. Then only will they get a 360-degree perspective of life.

Ramaswamy Sastry and Vighnesh Ghanapaathi