Middle class parents, those who cannot leave substantial legacies to their children, are acutely aware of the importance of education today. They are keen to provide the best possible educational facilities to their children. But most people subscribe to the myth that education is what happens only in schools and colleges. This makes them think that their role in the education of their children is limited to getting them admitted to prestigious educational institutions and footing the fat bills that land at regular intervals.

There is a great need today to educate parents on what it takes to participate in the education of their children sensitively and creatively. They need to wake up to their partnership with teachers in the academic well being of their children. And, as an important part of it, they need to understand the crucial role that family environment plays in the intellectual formation and facilitation of children. Parents need to know that there is much that they can do for their children, which cannot be palmed off to teachers. And if they do not care to do what they can for their children, it is not realistic to expect that teachers will fill the vacuum thus created. A teacher who deals with 40 or more children at a time cannot address the subtle nuances of a child's total formation as effectively as parents can in respect of their own children.

As regards education, the foremost parental duty is to create a domestic culture that is conducive to the intellectual formation and academic wholeness of children. This calls for a proper understanding of the meaning and scope of education. As long as parents see education only as the road map to lucrative jobs, it is not very likely that they understand the need for maintaining a pro-academic and intellectually stimulating atmosphere at home. Education needs to be seen as a sacred process that empowers human beings to attain their full potential as persons created in the image of God. It is tragic and suicidal to reduce the goal of education, to mere acquisition, the conversion of information into power or money. Nor is mere intellectuality the sum total of the dynamic of education. Understood aright, intellectuality is subsumed in spirituality. Unfortunately, spirituality has been superseded at the popular level either by mindless piety that disdains to have anything to do with the intellect or by secular scepticism. This has had an unhealthy influence on education.

The emphases that parents could keep in mind in creating a pro-educational domestic culture are:
(a)Integrate education with the given total context. It is because education is seen as a process isolated from the given ambiance of life that the role of parents in this context tends to be overlooked. For some strange reason, learning is assumed to be something that takes place only in schools and colleges. "Home work" is a burden that the child brings home from school. It is a routine spillover from school to home. This discontinuity between school and home parallels the divorce between knowing and doing, theory and practice, which partakes of the neurosis of our times. This has several and serious consequence.

First, it undermines the social value of education. The current approach to education neglects the formation of social conscience in students; and a special extra-curricular effort needs to be made to compensate this lacuna.

Second, it neglects skill-formation and erodes efficiency in the practical domain. At the undergraduate level a doctor today, for example, learns a great deal more by way of theory than his counterparts did fifty years ago, but is less skilled or able in practising medicine.

Third, it turns education into an individualistic and selfish enterprise that focuses somewhat wholly on self-advancement. The traditional assumption that education must inculcate a sense of mission in students is now all but forgotten. The resultant erosion of social imagination tends to aggravate criminal instincts in the educated class. Surely, an educated criminal is a greater threat to the society than an illiterate one.

Fourth, the current approach to education fails to kindle a passion for doing good. It is only when theory and practice, life and learning, are integrated that the energy and motivation for serving the needs and honouring the interests of others are imbibed and sustained. This is also the seed of human greatness.

Sadly, the current model of education breeds, except for a few glorious exceptions, an apathetic and self-centered elite. The failure to promote the spirit of selfless service is one of the foremost failures of education today. The split between theory and practice, besides, undermines human authenticity, the consistency between what we know and who we are. The result, in the words of T. S. Eliot, is that "between the intention and the effect falls the shadow". The insularity of the learning process from the rest of life undermines its transformative role and fails to produce authentic human beings who want to make a difference for the better. The spiritual requirement is that the word must become flesh, the distance between the ideal and the real must be progressively narrowed. Education must aim at incarnating knowledge. Knowledge does not become 'power' or produce fruits unless it is earthed and translated into the means for social transformation.

In the very nature of things, it is obvious that it is easier to effect this emphasis at home than in a school or college. Parents need to integrate their children into the total context of their homes and not bring them up as though homes are no more than hostels, where children are mere non-paying guests. Most parents 'spare' their children from domestic work or even discourage them from sharing any responsibility, to ensure that the education of their children does not suffer! The result is that abstract knowledge is increasing at the expense of practical skills. Knowing and living are parting company and becoming mutually exclusive.

This inhibits the spirit of service. The more educated a person gets, the less willing to serve he tends to be. This is contrary to the ideal of wholesome personality as exemplified in the life and works of Jesus: "The Son of Man has come not to be served, but to serve" (Mk. 10:45). The erosion of the spirit of service through education has serious consequences not only for the society but also for the families that constitute it. Ironically, the worst victims of this situation are parents themselves who may not receive help from their children when they need it most.

(b) Personal discipline. Faithfulness and commitment to what is undertaken is the secret of fruitfulness in life. This is the positive aspect of discipline. Discipline is not a blanket 'no' but the willingness to renounce indulgence to pursue the goals accepted. This is also what the Bible means by 'self-denial'. In a practical sense, the 'self' cannot practise self-denial by itself. Genuine and enduring self-denial is a by-product: the by-product of godliness. The awareness of God imparts a certain focus to our outlook. We cannot be godly and at the same time remain arbitrary or frivolous in our taste or disposition. Personal sanctity involves uncompromising fidelity, which enables us to overcome temptations. Temptations are pulls contrary to the cause espoused or direction chosen. They purport to fragment our lives, dissipate our energies and subvert our scope. The temptations, to which we succumb, rob us of our inner energy and our zeal, without which nothing of value can be achieved in life.

This is a principle of much significance in the context of education. It is disastrous to equate the learning process with some techniques either of mastering information or of excelling in examinations. Basic to the education of the mind is the training to engage an area of study or intellectual pursuit long enough to see the fruits thereof. Intellectual promiscuity, the inability to stay with what one is committed to, as well as the need to switch from one area to another as dictated by hope of immediate returns, is inimical to personal growth and fulfillment. Those who have explored deep and attained intellectual and personal stature are people who have had the strength of intellectual fidelity. And almost all of them have also had a deep spirituality, even if some of them may have seemed agnostics or atheists from a superficial religious perspective. Counseling his disciples on the discipline they were to maintain Jesus said, "He who endures to the end will be saved." This is as true of intellectual attainments as it is of spiritual stature.

While steadfastness is basic to the spiritual culture, the materialistic outlook is characterized by restlessness which, in the academic context, expresses itself as impatience with the given pursuit and context. Within the plausibility structure of materialism, this restlessness and the need for frequent change are legitimized as dynamism or enterprise. Spirituality does not sanctify the status quo. But it does not equate progress either with change for the sake of change or with change driven by acquisitiveness. Spiritual dynamism holds the key to human greatness and fulfillment.

Parents can do nothing more valuable for the long-term academic and intellectual well being of their children than laying the required foundation of personal discipline. It is this discipline, founded on true godliness, that helps children overcome the arbitrariness of approach based only on personal likes and dislikes by sustaining in them the effort it takes to come to terms with a subject to which they may not spontaneously take to. It does not have to be argued that going by our likes and dislikes alone, we are not likely to attain success, fulfillment or greatness. Jesus' insistence on our loving even our enemies has tremendous academic wisdom as well. The tendency, otherwise, is to deem a subject -say, mathematics- as one's personal enemy and to remain allergic towards it for the rest of one's life. Growing into newer and more challenging areas that today remain alien to us is the key to personal growth. Entertaining prejudices and allergies, on the other hand, is inimical to our development and well-being. Freedom from irrational allergies is the yardstick of one's personal stature. Intellectual discipline is, thus, basic to academic excellence; and that discipline is naturally and universally internalized through our relationship with God who demands steadfastness and large-heartedness from us. Spirituality involves the overcoming of the arbitrariness and allergies of our dispositions. It is a call to master the caprice and whimsicalities of the self and to align it to the path of growth and development, without looking for easy means and instant gratifications.

(c) The contemplative spirit. Living as we do in an age of empirical pragmatism, we stand in danger of losing the balance between action and contemplation. This imbalance tilts in favour of a hectic way of life in which our external life supersedes our inner life. This makes for superficiality in all aspects of life, including our intellectual life. Profundity is a matter of depth, not of the surface. Also, to the extent that we get alienated form the life within, we also lose the ability to deal with the external world in a meaningful and wholesome way.

Contrary to the negative and escapist messages about God that people receive from the custodians of religion, the scripture is emphatic that our communion with God involves a bridge between the sanctuary within and the world around us. The God within is experienced in contemplation, prayer and silence. God is honoured in the external world through loving action; for God is love. Silence is the inner language of love; compassionate action is the language of godly love in the world outside. Godliness, therefore, cannot be seen as an 'optional extra'. It is, instead, the very source of our life's wholeness.

The educational process needs to be situated within this idea of wholeness, lest education becomes a source of social ill health. That ill heath has several symptoms. The arrogance that Paul associates with mere academic knowledge is one of them. (1 Cor. 8:1). Superficiality, and the control-orientation that goes with it, is another. So also, the pathological self-centredness and elitist alienation from the life of the people. From an academic sense, the atrophy of the contemplative spirit is a serious handicap. Teaching students of this kind is best expressed in the words of Jesus' parable as sowing seeds on rocky soil that lacks depth (Mtt. 13: 5-6). They cannot go very far with whatever is made available to them. Given the current approach to education, it is extremely difficult to address this lacuna in the course of schooling or even higher education. In this respect parents need to minister to their children. But there are no slick formulae for this. The contemplative spirit is best nurtured through the reading of scripture, worship and prayer life, all of which need to be supplemented by compassionate action and involvement in the world of realities including human suffering. Serving must be seen as integral to learning. The tendency to see education as insulated from the social context and living environment is dangerously illiterate.

(d) Listening skills. We tend to underestimate the importance of, and difficulty in, listening. The quality of a person's capacity to listen is the key to his personality as well as his growth-potential. The contrast is between receptivity and rebelliousness. Surely, the former is more conducive than the latter to learning and growth. Listening takes energy. The ability to listen is in no way less useful or less important than the ability to speak. As a matter of fact, to be a good speaker one has to be a good listener. Even more importantly, being a good listener is a basic requirement for building good relationships. In a hurting world, one who listens sensitively is sure to do more good than those who only want to be heard. Listening, not less than speaking, is a skill which needs to be nurtured. And it so happens that the best way to do that is to learn to listen to God. Rightly understood, prayer is as much an exercise in listening to God as it is in speaking to God. Unknowingly our capacity to listen gets enriched and enlarged through worship. It is significant that impatience with worship has increased proportionately as the spurious pace of life has increased. This seemingly accelerated pace of life is mostly a delusion created by our inner restlessness. This restlessness undermines a person's capacity to focus, to concentrate and to learn. The inability to focus, in turn, aggravates one's restlessness, forming a vicious cycle that thwarts the potentialities in the person concerned. Patience is a basic eligibility requirement for learning. Patience stems from the over-all orientation of our being and it cannot be cultivated in itself. The business of godliness is not to provide a formula for cultivating patience but to form our personality in such a way that patience becomes its defining quality.

Impatience results mainly from the tendency to take everything on one's own terms and according to one's own whims and fancies. While the world may see this as a sign of privilege, spiritually this is a sign of weakness and bankruptcy; for no one with such a disposition can relate to God. God being sovereign, we have to wait on Him. We cannot take God on our terms, though that is what we try to do most of the time. Spiritually, this is an insult to the majesty and authority of God. Even in ordinary human interactions this is a source of offence and hurt. The willingness to listen to others creatively declines proportionately as we lose the ability to take others as seriously as we would like to be taken by them. Unfortunately, the value-neutral approach to education does not seek to correct this aberration and treats listening skills as though they are an autonomous entity in themselves. Education, rather than heal and integrate our scattered and divided existence, seems to reinforce the individualistic and solipsistic tendencies in modern culture. The remedy for this can only be spiritual.

(e) A sense of mission. Every individual has a sense of mission. It is in respect of the nature and scope of mission that a godly person differs from his worldly counterpart. While the former has a sense of mission that is broad enough to accommodate the concerns of God and the needs of one's fellow human beings, the latter is apt to be centred somewhat exclusively on oneself. In the long-term, this is harmful and pathological vis-à-vis personality formation. Even in immediate terms, this outlook narrows one's mental horizons and distorts the formation of one's personality. Also, for want of an inspiring, sustaining and uplifting sense of mission, young people tend to drift from day-to-day; whereas those who work according to a long-term vision rise above the ups and downs to which all people, especially the young, are otherwise vulnerable. The most important by-product of the sense of mission is purity or sanctity of life.

It is noteworthy that in all traditions of religious thought, especially in the biblical, sanctity is insisted on as the foundation of human wellbeing in every area of life. As a matter of fact, purity is the basis for physical life. Almost all vital organs of the body -heart, lungs, liver, kidneys etc- are designated to maintaining the purity of the body. Purity or sanctity is even more important for the life of the spirit than it is for the body. It is logically inevitable, therefore, that when the purity of the body, mind or spirit is compromised, our well-being is endangered. Because we are a body-mind-spirit continuum, the impurity in one sphere can undermine our well-being in all others. If the sanctity of the body is violated or compromised, the capacities of the mind and the spirit also are undermined. The need to preserve the sanctity of life through a spiritually informed discipline of life does not become obvious to most people, unless they are driven by a clear sense of mission that is too large for the unaided individual powers to sustain. Mission as the shaping principle of one's life is the best safeguard against dissipation and desultoriness.

It is particularly important this decisively insight is understood and appropriated in all its seriousness at the present time; for the cultural taste in many areas of life seem to be for the cheap, the corrupt, the prurient, the transitory and the sensational. Students are quicker and keener, for example, to add slang words of low taste to their vocabulary. They are more like to imitate negative role-models than emulate the life of great men and women. This is because the plausibility structure operating within the emerging culture discounts the value of sanctity and encourages the low and the prurient. The goal of education should be, on the contrary, to enable the educated to fix their minds on the higher rather than the lower things, tastes and thoughts of life. Practical wisdom proves that this may not happen unless a sense of godly or altruistic mission is imbibed that stretches our faculties and energies to the limit and impels us to maximum all-round growth.

(f) The transformation of the mind. In a spiritual sense, the goal of education is the transformation of the individuals. This involves, basically, the attainment of fullness of life of which the empowerment to do good is an essential ingredient. The key strategy in this respect should be the transformation of human mind. Mind is the "control box" of personal choice and action. It is the lens through which every human being looks at the world, understands its significance, scope and need. It is also the medium through which we understand ourselves. But the problem is this. What stands in need of transformation cannot transform itself; for transformation involves rising above the inherent aberrations or weaknesses of the entity involved. The aberrations of the mind cannot be mastered by the mind that is crippled by these aberrations. So the resources and strength for it need to be derived from a source beyond itself. This cannot be the sphere of the body; for the body is lower in the hierarchy of our being to the mind. The mind controls the body. The mind can be transformed only if the resources of the Spirit are brought to bear on it.

Readers and students of the Bible will not fail to notice the priority that the biblical vision of life attaches to the human need for mental transformation. The mission of Jesus was focused on this in a special way. Unfortunately, in course of time the spotlight shifted from transformation to conversion. Conversion without transformation does more harm than good. So it is the case with education sans mental transformation. In such a context skills are handed over the people whose minds are unregenerate and unrighteous. There is no guarantee that they will not use for destructive and exploitative purposes. In His public ministry, Jesus attached greater importance to teaching than to miracle working, including healing. Indeed, He believed that healing without incomplete without mental transformation. The same should be deemed true also of education. Especially the Christian approach to education cannot separate skill formation from mental transformation. At the same time, mental transformation needs to be seen as an integral part of holistic spiritual formation.

(g) Healthy personality. The goal of education, in the ultimate analysis, cannot be anything less than the formation of wholesome personality. That this is widely recognized, albeit in a seminal and intuitive way, is evident from the emphasis in all philosophies and approaches to education on value-education. At the level of implication, however, the thrust on value-education, tends to get stuck. This is because values cannot be nurtured like empirical or professional skills in isolation from the total formation of the individual student as well as, at least, the sub-culture of the institution that nurtures him. It is the radical, and seemingly intimidating, nature of the task involved that makes educational institutions fight shy of this key insight. This lacuna can be addressed -and needs to be addressed - by parents.

The key principle in the formation of healthy human personality is the balance between the interests of the self and the needs of others. The moral compulsion to attend to the needs of others can come only from God as Creator and from no other source. It is because God is the Father of us all that we cannot afford to be apathetic to others and selfish in our disposition. We cannot love God without loving our neighbours. That is a basic assumption in biblical ethics. Ungodliness can upset the balance between the self and others. When that happens, the ethical bulwark against criminality is destroyed. The basic pattern in crime is the collapse of the emotional, social and spiritual balance between the self and others. If I love others as I love myself, it is impossible that I seek to derive any advantage for myself at the expense of anyone else. An educated criminal or thief -a distressingly familiar phenomenon at the present time, going by the number of top-level bureaucrats put on the internet by the Chief Vigilance Commissioner- should be recognized as a contradiction in terms and all possible corrective steps adopted to remedy this lamentable and dangerous situation.

The spiritual is concern that the innate noble elements in human nature, rather than their meaner counterparts, find expression in public life. Commenting on this Jesus said, "No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel, but on the lamp-stand" (Mtt. 5: 15). This insight offers a useful way of understanding the scope of education. A student may be seen as a light hidden under a bushel. What should happen in the course of education is the gradual removal of all that obstruct this inner light from expressing itself through the life of the individual concerned. The key factor here is the faith that the inner light is there. This is not a hypothesis available in the secular approach, or is likely to be taken seriously by such an approach.

The spiritual insight into human nature, as reflected in the words of Jesus, can offer profound practical wisdom to teachers of all religious persuasion or of no persuasion at all. It is only in relation to such an understanding -that there in inner potential: the light that can be called forth- that teaching can become a facilitating activity. It may be mentioned in passing here that to educate is, literally, to "call forth". It is to bring out into the open what remains hidden at the given moment. It is, to use the metaphors of Jesus, to lift the bushel so that the hidden light becomes visible and the lamp gives light to all around.

The counter approach to teaching is to assume that the mind of a student is like an empty slate on which the teacher registers a stipulated quantity of information. This is, by and large, the secular idea of the teaching-learning process, and it sees the student as a passive consumer of the information provided. Education then ceases to be a shared pilgrimage in which the student is an active participant. Such an idea of education is tenable only within the materialist-consumerist approach to life.

Jesus never treated his listeners -his students in the school of life- as the passive recipients of mere information. He assumed that the light was inside of them what was required of the teacher was to lift the blanket of alienation and disability that had fallen on it on account of the Fall. That was why Jesus taught through parables. The parabolic method of teaching envisages the active participation of the listener -the student- in the learning process. The conclusion and application -the moral and the mandate of the parable- are left wholly to the audience. Jesus' slogan as a teacher was, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear".

It is when an attempt is made to bring the hidden light into the open -i.e. both the conscious levels of the individual mind and the public context- that education could bring about "enlightenment". Enlightenment, rather than employment, is the primary concern in the spiritual approach to education. This does not imply that employment is unimportant. What this assumes is that employment need not exclude enlightenment, but that the most constructive contribution to nation-building is to prepare people for enlightened employment. This is a task that needs to be shared by parents and teachers alike. And it needs to be addressed within the ambiance of spirituality.

Parents and teachers need to wake up to their role as social healers. This is all the more important and urgent when a society is sick unto death, as seems to be the case with our society at the present time. We are so conditioned to think of doctors and godmen as healers that remain blind to the healing role that every other spiritually enlightened person can play in a society. As regards the macro situation in a society, what the parents in partnership with teachers can do is incomparably more important than the work of doctors. Doctors attend to the limited health needs of individuals. They have hardly anything to do, as long as they limit themselves to the curative approach of western medicine- with the health of a society. Homes and classrooms need to be seen as the healing centres of a society. Teachers need to regain their morale and know that they have an assured place in the life of a nation as social healers, if only they dare to address this possibility not as an optional extra, but as integral to their vocation as teachers.

Parents and children: some practical suggestions

1. Parents as counselors. On account of a variety of factors, children are being denied the benefit of proper guidance from their parents. This is due to as well as contributes to the wasting of family. Children, especially in their adolescence, need clear guidelines and forthright opinions, even if they do not appreciate these in an immediate sense. This cannot be done if parents themselves are confused about the basics. Young people have no use for wishy-washy approaches. Now-a-days parents, insofar as they fear they have lost their authority with their own children, palm off the counseling responsibilities to teachers. This is not a feasible alternative, under any stretch of imagination. For parents to be able to counsel their children effectively they need to

(a) deepen and strengthen their mutual relationships
(b) be clear and consistent about the basics
(c) safeguard the foundation for their authority with their own children and
(d) participate imaginatively and sensitively on a continuing basis in the growth and development of their children, and not just remain financiers of their wards' education.

2. Parents, if they are to stimulate the growth of their children, need to be committed to their own continuing intellectual growth. The best that the parents can do for themselves and for their children is to create a family culture orientated on growth. Only those who are committed to growth and are growing can stimulate growth in others. It cannot be that parents lead a lazy life and expect children to be the paragons of industry and achievements. Children cannot but imitate their children. It is when the parents are not worthy or imitation that children become vulnerable to peer-pressure.

3. Vigil against distractions. Life today is beset with multiplying distractions. Modern life is divided and does not make for sustained concentration, which is essential for intellectual growth and academic wellbeing. Parents need to ensure, as a matter of sending out clear signals to their children, avoid distractions or at least minimize them. It is a pity that most parents are not even aware of the distractions and negative signals they send to their children. Take for example the habit of either grumbling, gossiping or loose talk, all of which waste time, energy and dissipate concentration. They are patently incompatible with the academic or spiritual orientation. Parents must do all they can to ensure that the atmosphere in the house is conductive to sound intellectual and emotional formation.

4. Do not indulge your children. Parents who feel guilty about having to neglect their children, on account the claims of the outside world on them, make matters worse by indulging their children, as if to make amends. It does not help to lose sight of the distinction between love and indulgence. While love inspires, indulgence breeds inertia. It prevents children from acquiring the mental and physical stamina they need to struggle and to grow. As a result, looking for the line of least resistance becomes second nature to them. This breeds an escapist personality that cripples the person. Children who are brought up in indolence tend to have a distorted idea of reality, as though life is nothing but an extended cartoon film. So when it comes to engaging reality they tend to dodge or give up too soon.

5. Postponement of pleasure. Immediacy of sensation and gratification is a mark of childishness. It cannot be expected of a child that he will postpone a pleasurable experience to do something of long-term significance. But this needs to be expected from those who are growing up, because postponement of pleasure is basic to the human sense of responsibility. Those who allow themselves to be dictated by immediate sensations cannot apply themselves consistently to a process that is spread over a period of time. And all of human experiences and enterprises that yield anything valuable and enduring exist in a time frame, as is the case with education itself. The strategy of immediacy, by which one prefers instant rewards and gratifications, is incompatible with the logic of human greatness. Intellectual and spiritual discipline involves the willingness to balance the claims of the present against the possibilities in the future. Pleasure-seeking breeds satiety and blunts the motivation to struggle and excel. Those who live for pleasure have their rewards in the given moment and will have little to look forward to.

6. A positive spirit. It happens often that two children coming from almost identical socio-economic backgrounds differ in their levels of achievement. The reason for this is, largely, the negativity of positivity of spirit that pervades the two homes. Chronic grumbling makes the atmosphere of a house oppressive and it stifles the child's capacity for initiative. On the other hand, a spirit of thanksgiving and a positive attitude to opportunities, equip the child to fight odds and prevail. It is tragic how parents unwittingly cripple their children by infecting them with negativity and bitterness.

7. Banish boredom. Hard work does not have to be boring. As a matter of fact, work can be a source of stimulation, a catalyst for joy. Boredom results from a mechanical and mindlessly quantitative approach to work. It indicates that learning has been degraded into drudgery, which does not have to be the case. It is here that at least educated parents can make a difference for the better. There is a need to complement formal course work with extra-curricular intellectual and creative stimulants, if a child's educational morale is to be sustained. Very often a child gets bored or burdened because the work that is thrust on him does not seem to make sense within his range of awareness. A child is not able to connect the given task with what lies ahead. It is this linkage that parents can make visible. They also need to help their children understand the value of discipline and enable them to think of hard work as an investment for the future. This is, comparatively, a more difficult thing to do than pumping one's children to perform better day after day. Most parents now tend to function in terms of the spirit of competition. They get obsessed with marks. In the process, the foundation for achievement is forgotten. An alternate and healthier approach is to enable the children to do their best for their own development and progress on a daily basis. If each day is lived well, the future will take care of itself; for the future comes one day at a time.

8. Mind quality not less than quantity. It is unfortunately true today that there is no necessary correlation between the marks a student scores in examinations and the quality of his studentship. Assessment is become more and more quantitative. This affects the attitude of parents to the education of their children. The entire learning process gets compressed into a mark-list, which alone is real and important. The taste a student has for a subject, the native talent or special aptitude he has, his potential to be a leader or a sensitive, compassionate human being, and so on, are all lost sight of. At the same time, most people also know that, in a long-term perspective, the positive attitude or a student or his special aptitudes are far more decisive than the marks scored in examinations today. This however prevents none from getting neurotic about the sore sheet. This attitude is not very helpful for the academic formation of the children.

9. Inculcate the right priorities. Most people tend to live from day-to-day, facing situations as they come, being shaped by the general drift of the prevailing situation. For want of a clear sense of purpose or mission, people find it difficult to prioritize. One's order of priorities cannot be separated from what one lives for. And if one is not living for anything in particular, it is not likely that the need to define his priorities will make sense to him. The ability to identify the right priorities and the character-strength to stick to them is the backbone of personality. This is all the more true about the life of a student. Almost always it is those who do not prioritize their academic responsibilities and allow themselves to be carried away by whatever happens around them, who come to grief academically. As a matter of fact, education should nurture in young people the ability to form and adhere to right priorities. Our spiritual life is also a matter of priorities. It is to this practical truth that Jesus draws our attention when he says, "Seek first the Kingdom and God's righteousness". Sensitive parental supervision over the character formation of their children is required in this respect. Too late in the day parents discover that their children were living according to priorities that were not conducive to their academic progress. They need not always be wicked or dishonourable preoccupations. Some of them may even be altruistic. If a student deems his academic work secondary to social service, he cannot be said to be living according to the right priorities, even though social work is undeniably noble in itself. Except for rare exceptions, the hidden truth in such a situation could well be that the person concerned uses his inclination towards social service as an escape-route from academic responsibilities. The priority of a student must be academic excellence for the time being and he should devote himself to social action only to the extent that it does not amount to neglecting his school/college work. Parents need to realize that they play an important role in the life of their children in respect of the formation of their priorities, either positively or negatively.

10. Home-orientation. It has been noticed that children who tend to wander around fare poorly in studies. Arguably this is a problem more acute among boys, though in the cities this picture is now undergoing a change. While healthy out-door life is necessary, it should not be allowed to erode the home-centredness of a young person's life. It does not have to be argued that those who wander about will not develop the mental concentration it takes to do justice to their studies. This vagrancy in respect of home has serious consequences also in later life. Such young people tend to play truant even in respect of the responsibilities in their married life later, creating untold misery especially for the immediate members of their families. But nurturing the home-orientation of young people is not a matter of imposing restrictions on their movements. More importantly, it is a matter of creating and sustaining a healthy, happy family atmosphere that would not prompt young people to seek relief from the boredom or oppression at home in the freer world outside.

Conclusion

Parents need to wake up to the art of laying the foundation for the academic welfare of their children. It is unrealistic to assume that one's parental responsibilities in respect of the education of one's children are over with getting them admitted to a good or prestigious school. Education involves a partnership between parents and teachers. Children, in turn, need to sustain their enthusiasm throughout their studentship and joyfully accept the discipline it takes to excel in studies. Academic excellence is best seen not as an ego-trip or a means to institutional recognition or prestige, but as an investment in equipping oneself for the opportunities in the future to serve one's fellow human beings with devotion and distinction.