The Impossible Position of Children: They are the Reminders of the Past and the Holders of the Future
Introduction
People of different ages have varying roles in society and the making of society’s history. While society expects the adults and the elderly to give advice to the younger population on how to transition from one developmental stage to the other, the youths and young adults are expected to develop various strategies and ways to invest for their bright future. Children often rest in an impossible position as they usually remind the rest of society about the past while expected to be the future of society. For instance, when an elderly person tries to advise a child to behave in a certain positive way, the child becomes adamant and emphasizes acting in a way that negatively affects their morals. The elder person will often remember how they were corrected and changed to become better people in society or how they failed to listen and thus lived miserable lives.
Conversely, every parent desire to raise their kids in a way that they could become successful in future and contribute to the betterment of society. According to Haer (2019), children have wild imaginations and unique ideas. Besides, they do not fear trying new ideas in their positive thoughts. In light of this, parents and nations invest in children in many ways, including education and quality health, to ensure that they can utilize their creativity for future developments, especially in developing strategies to address various societal challenges.
An Impossible Position for Children Trying to Learn in Languages they cannot Understand
Many children who come to class may not understand the teacher’s words or the content given to them because the language used in school differs from the words spoken at home. Many studies, including the results of last year’s Global Education Monitoring Report, have consistently shown how this affects education. It forces youngsters to study in a language they are unfamiliar with. Students normally begin to understand and then learn in the third or fourth grade.
This has a dreadful legacy of children who feel on the outside looking in, are kept out of learning, and are afraid of falling behind and failing even before they start school (Zhang & Tullis, 2021). According to many studies, this encourages kids to give up and drop out. Furthermore, in multi-ethnic communities, creating a dominant language via schooling often leaves a legacy of increased social and cultural inequality and the marginalization of non-dominant groups. Learning a foreign language effectively closes the classroom door when it collides with pre-existing areas of poverty or marginalization. The irony is that it is common sense for youngsters to understand the language in which they are being educated.
Government and children development
On the other hand, governments are not doing enough: up to 40% of the world’s population is taught in a language they do not understand. Civil society activists and campaigners have worked relentlessly to spread the idea that teaching and learning should occur in the mother tongue languages first and foremost. This is critical for constructing more equal educational institutions and is part of a larger social justice and cultural diversity movement (Walenski & Love, 2018). Since its beginnings 17 years ago, the international education rights movement has used International Mother Language Day to highlight the ongoing battle for mother-tongue learning. Various civil society education coalitions, including those backed by the Civil Society Education Fund, have been at the forefront of the fight for improved mother-tongue policy and holding governments accountable for its implementation as part of the Global Campaign for Education.
Several nations, including Nepal, entrenched the right to mother tongue education for all to ensure that children can sufficiently express their emotions, thoughts and ideas. This was a significant success for the cause of appreciating the importance of learning one’s native language. As part of a bigger plan to influence the creation of the Nepalese national agenda on the new Sustainable Development Goals and the Education 2030 agenda, NCE has advocated for all pre-primary education to be taught in the mother language (Hazle et al., 2016). Despite this constitutional commitment and regulations that are beginning to take shape, there is a large funding gap to address a scarcity of instructors who can teach courses in their native tongue and learning tools to support this. This echoes a long-held concern among education activists: governments usually view mother-tongue learning as too difficult and costly to adopt. In addition to Spanish, the new National Education Act of 2010 mandated that all pupils study an indigenous language and culture. To meet this obligation, a big project was started, which includes steps critical in a nation with such ethnic diversity, such as adjusting delivery to local conditions.
Children’s schooling and future growth
In multilingual communities, indigenous Educational Councils choose which language should be used in schools through participatory community committees. CBD works on several fronts to help communities become more involved and participatory, as well as to build social responsibility mechanisms and implement the 2010 Education Act. It is just untenable that any child is left behind, unable to comprehend the language they have been instructed for hours. This is a flagrant infringement on one’s right to education. Teaching everyone in their home tongue is difficult, especially in multi-ethnic countries (Qu & Ong, 2016). Once the necessary foundations have been set, they can go on to study in a language different from their own. At the very least, this includes putting money into the mother tongue throughout the early years. Governments must also invest in the recruitment and development of mother-tongue teachers, provide mother-tongue instructors and instructional materials, and engage with communities to ensure that education reflects local diversity.
Children are the reminders
Young children are prone to forgetfulness. And no matter how much parents attempt to convince their children that they will forget, they will seldom be able to compensate for their mistakes on their own. They may need to be reminded to make their bed before leaving the house. As children become older, they eventually gain the capacity to compensate for memory lapses. They don’t start using visual cues as reminders in a strategic way until they’re in late elementary school, when they think they’re most likely to forget. According to a recent study, youngsters aged seven to thirteen played a computer game in which they had to remember to complete one or three future tasks (Zhang & Tullis, 2021). When asked how they believed they would fare in the game, children of all ages agreed that their performance would suffer if there were more acts to remember in the future. This is hardly unexpected, given that even young children as young as three recognize that long lists of objects are more difficult to recall than shorter ones. What was striking, however, was that only the older children, around nine and up, set more reminders for themselves when they knew their memory would fail (Masten, 2018). One conclusion is that if young children are asked to complete multiple activities, they may find it difficult to determine which ones require a reminder and which ones they can remember on their own.
These findings are consistent with earlier studies that suggest youngsters only begin to correct for predicted memory lapses around the age of nine or ten. Although youngsters as young as six or seven years old can differentiate between simple and difficult topics to remember for a memory exam, it is not until they are nine or ten years old that they begin to study difficult items more than easy items. There appears to be a fundamental gap between what young children understand about their cognitive limits and what they try to mitigate their effects (Raico, 2017). These findings show that informing younger children of their anticipated memory failures, such as by reminding them that they may forget to bring home a letter from school, is unlikely to improve their memory performance. Even young toddlers are likely to be aware of their memory problems. If they can be taught how to employ these unloading tactics, young children, who are forgetful at the best of times, may be among the most likely to profit from them.
Children are future holders
Children are the world’s future, making people proud and happy. They enter the world as helpless infants, free of prejudices and preconceptions. All the negative events that occur in their later years are mostly attributable to what adults have taught them. They have the propensity to mimic and model themselves after the adults in their life. Parents want their children to have a decent education, find a good profession, start a family, and make them proud to be their parents (Zhang & Tullis, 2021). What the young people see and experience daily frequently derail these expectations. They see many of their leaders behaving obnoxiously and childishly to obtain power, then participating in self-serving acts rather than learning how to work and compromise with individuals with opposite viewpoints.
Parents want their children to be peaceful and law-abiding on the one hand while simultaneously bombarding them with music and films that promote violence, mayhem, dirt, and the nasty side of life on the other. We want our children to be safe and responsible drivers, but every television commercial depicts automobiles speeding, swerving, and engaging in other dangerous driving behaviours (Hazle et al., 2016). Parents want their children to accept all people regardless of skin colour or religion, yet they witness adults parading about pushing for racial and religious hatred. Furthermore, they argue that children deserve better than us as adults. Teachers working in schools around the country deserve all the credit for attempting to combat the bad influences society is inflicting on children’s futures daily.
Conclusion
Children are a very important resource in society despite their perceived awkward position. While they help the elder to reflect on their past, they give them hope that there will be a continuation of the human race. Besides, children give hope to the elder in the sense that there is a chance to develop solutions for challenges that the elders face and are unable to develop solutions. The issue of children’s transcript speech, funded by the International Association’s Child Speech Committee, demonstrates how transcription has evolved over the previous several decades and brings readers up to speed on state of the art. Time, training, and hence money are still essential factors in making transcription easier in the clinical context, but transcription’s value in clinical management has not been reduced.
References
Haer, R. (2019). Children and armed conflict: looking at the future and learning from the past. Third World Quarterly, 40(1), 74-91.
Hazle, J., Jordan, D., & Orton, C. (2016). Future qualifications as a qualified clinical medical physicist should be restricted to doctoral degree holders. Medical Physics, 43(4), 1585-1587. https://doi.org/10.1118/1.4942805
Masten, A. S. (2018). Resilience theory and research on children and families: Past, present, and promise. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 10(1), 12-31.
Qu, L., & Ong, J. (2016). Impact of Reminders on Children’s Cognitive Flexibility, Intrinsic Motivation, and Mood Depends on Who Provides the Reminders. Frontiers In Psychology, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01904
Raico, N. (2017). The entrapment of major holders: how big financial players shape the future of the US dollar. Journal Of International Relations And Development, 21(4), 959-989. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-017-0090-4
Walenski, M., & Love, T. (2018). The Real-Time Comprehension of Idioms by Typical Children, Children with Specific Language Impairment and Children with Autism. Journal Of Speech Pathology & Therapy, 03(01). https://doi.org/10.4172/2472-5005.1000130
Zhang, D., & Tullis, J. (2021). Personal reminders: Self-generated reminders boost memory more than normatively related ones. Memory & Cognition, 49(4), 645-659. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01120-7
