We hear the acronym VUCA being thrown around a lot nowadays, and with good reason. We do live in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world. It takes a look perhaps at any news channel or a flip through a newspaper to confirm it! But what does this mean for our children? What implications does this new ‘state’ of the world have for the way parents raise children and the way schools function?
To Every Parent, To Every School by V. Raghunathan and Meena Raghunathan (Penguin) takes on the task of decoding the steps and the skills that would be invaluable to parents, teachers, schools and other stakeholders as they lead the current and future generation of children into the VUCA world.
When one is looking at the future, it is never advisable to carry forward the framework of the past. What is this changed framework that the book talks about? What does it look like and what does it entail?
The authors have pin-pointed on some broad principles that could serve as guiding forces- for example, choosing cooperation over competition, building resilience, adding the dimension of hobbies and so on. The book captures the zeitgeist in examining what children truly need from institutions like schools. The book in a way describes how individual stakeholders as well as institutions can use few key principles of the changed world to raise resilient children in a VUCA world.
Each chapter has a section that points out some specific action pointers that will help readers translate the concepts mentioned in the book into action.
The concept of Adverisity Quotient is something interesting that the book elaborates on. It refers to the resilience ability of an individual or “the ability of an individual to think, manage, direct and revert brute challenges and difficulties in life”. The book covers how the AQ could be increased and how resilience can be built in children. Just like AQ, the topics of resilience, facing a risky world in context of specific risks that children are subject to such as sexual predators, bullying, etc. What are things that parents and schools can do for the same? Whole school approaches find presence in the book as do individual action pointers. The inclusion of a chapter on hobbies is also quite welcome.
There are many anecdotes and short stories that accompany the concepts which make it easy to understand. In fact, sharing some of these with the children themselves might also be a great way to set the ball rolling!
I found two chapters particularly important in terms of a futuristic outlook. First, choosing cooperation over competition and second is the one on hobbies. Unfortunately, our traditional schooling setups ignore these two very often but they are crucial for children to lead more holistic lives.
In short, the book gives the reader a series of action pointers and concepts that one can implement today within educational institutions, to prepare our children for tomorrow.
