I Do not Want To Write

I was recently talking to this young girl in her middle school classes. She says, she hates writing, but loves to learn. I knew that this girl was actually quite talented. She builds innovative crafts models. She makes amazing sketches which speaks by themselves. So why this problem of writing is there? Writing as an expression of human thoughts and emotions has evolved since the man lived in caves. The walls of caves were a good sketch pad as well as a note pad for early man. So why is it that many children in the new generation do not want to write? Many of us will attribute this to increase in keyboard and touchpad based human expression in last two decades. To some extent this is true. But! The greater part I attribute to changes in the need for communication. In our childhood we were supposed to write letters to all our key relatives of both paternal and maternal side. Invariably they were also expected to reply too. There used to be pen pal clubs. When social networking revolution started, I thought that people have a new tool of expression and they will now start writing again. But, instead of original expressions the cut-paste business started ruling the digital screens. The advent of Whatsapp killed even the Facebook type of expressions and people just became message forwarders. So! How can I expect the little girl to like the expression of writing? The schooling we conduct today do have things where learners are forced to write, but I personally know many teachers who pass on pre-written project files to their favorite students so that they are relieved from writing project files all over again. They themselves guide them to prepare just for exams and leave everything else. The system of formative assessment we have adopted as a tool add burden over learners, rather than as a tool to add-on to the educational value of the content.

 

A society can progress and then sustain itself only with its thought leadership. A thought leader has to express something that needs to be ultimately documented somewhere in some form. This could be writing on a stone palette, a tree bark, a computer hard disk or a cloud storage. A society which doesn’t want to write will not sustain. The alarm is already ringing for our society. It is time to wake-up. Stop forwarding. Write less, but write for sure. 

Dr. Sunil Ji Garg