WE have discussed in earlier articles that when each child is born, the potential to do every normal thing is there; this means that, as Howard Gardener says in the theory of Multiple Intelligences, “each child is naturally endowed with the full spectrum of the nine intelligences, encompassing the bodily kinesthetic, naturalistic, existential, spatial, musical, inter-personal, intra-personal, logico-mathematical and linguistic intelligences.”
What differs from child to child is the degree to which each of the intelligences is developed and also the extent to which each of the intelligences can be developed.
The focus this week is need for parents to identify the areas their child is most interested in and enjoys most; those areas in which it is captivated, and in which it gets engrossed because it is in these areas that its special gifts lie.
So the challenge to parents is: Search through the nine intelligences and you will find some things your child is special in.
Hapana mwana asina zvake zvakakosha zvokukupembedzai nazvo.
There are many children who are labelled slow, at risk or ‘special’ when they are perfectly normal.
Sometimes attempts are made to put them through some psychological tests, but these are limited because they are designed to evaluate from the same narrow perspective of the existing school curriculum.
When children are misunderstood and misjudged, they can tell and they feel hurt and they disengage, sometimes they hold on and they break in the process.
It is mindboggling how children are labelled while they are still at kindergarten, when the buds have hardly opened.
“Ah ichi hachigoni, ichi chakapusa, ichi chakangwara, and this one is anti-social,” and worse.
To begin with, the majority of those who work in early childhood education and care facilities in our country do not have the requisite qualifications for the job let alone any specialisation that qualifies them to assess children and ‘label’ them.
Children are busy discovering the world, they are tuning into the many capacities they have to understand the world and enjoy it.
But before they know it, while they are still enjoying the butterflies and enjoying the flowers, we uproot them, strap them into straight-jackets and force-march them along a straight path with nothing to capture their enchanted minds.
Something in them dies and we wonder why homework is such an irritant; why it is such a nightmare to have the work done.
Sometime in August last year, a little Grade Zero boy heard his teacher announce that they would come for extra lessons during the holiday.
His comment when he got home was: “Maextra lessons emakwire-dzake, kwire-dzake, handiende ini!”
He was referring to the shapes they had been doing over and over the previous two terms.
He never went.
These children we label with so many names have no problems; they are quite alert and astute.
They have their faculties intact, and they will use them to excel beyond our imagination if we tune into their right frequencies.
You cannot open the door with the wrong key, in the end you might have to break the door and in the process damage it.
As long as the children are force-marched into a certain path which is not theirs, they will never make it, they will never be at peace, they will never be fulfilled, they will never achieve what they desire.
We must explore and pursue what the children are intrinsically interested in, and that might save its energies for the other mundane areas it has to go through in order to fill the schooling basket.
Parents get upset about their children’s proficiency in English and no one can convince them it is not important.
Inga chero mapenzi okuEngland anopenga wani in unbroken English, does it mean they are better than our children who do not speak English? Instead, parents should be worrying about their children’s mastery of the mother language because research has long proved that the mother language lays the foundation for any other subsequent languages and anything else they might learn because all they have ever learned from birth is coded in the mother language.
Parents do not have to feel: “But so and so’s child is good about this; he got straight As and mine didn’t.”
Firstly so and so’s child is not your child.
Probably so and so’s child got As because those are the areas in which it is strong and they are not your child’s areas of strength.
So it is not just a matter of more of the same; more lessons, more classes.
There is no need to force feed the children, they should learn freely, they need opportunities to ensconce with areas that challenge what they are about and something will be normal.
There is no need to rush them because you will only get to the wrong destination.
It has to be about the children, not about us.
There is too much pressure on children to make it vari murukodoya; there is no space for them to be joyful, to be themselves in the teaching and learning experiences.
There is too much pressure for them to be like so and so’s child, they come into the world with their own unique package of gifts for mankind, and yet there is no space for them to be the special persons they are.
They need a break so that the genius in them can emerge and flourish, and be of benefit to us, to the nation of Zimbabwe.
We cannot build a great nation with broken minds and hearts.
Dr Mahamba is a war veteran and holds a PhD from Havard University. She is currently doing consultancy work.