Where are our moral values heading?

Dec 15:  The horrible incident at a Gurgaon school in which a 12 year-old school boy shot his classmate to settle some personal score is certainly an indication to our deteriorating socio-cultural intolerance and basic moral values among our children. This also puts a question mark on the whole education value system, the role of media and the subsequent degeneration of character.

It’s not a question how western culture influence our children to adopt such extreme steps but to what extent we as a responsible citizen try to keep-up the age old culture and make those moral values incorporate in the mind of our next generation.

There is talk of the western “gun culture” but what we are trying to avoid is our duties as a caring parent, an enlighten teacher and a concerned media. Hence here for the case it’s the parent, teacher and media together who should be blamed for the heinous incident.

Parental care that sets the first step in every child’s life by teaching values like love, tolerance, trust in young mind, which later help him/her to become a good human being. But with the advent of nuclear families and the high performance work culture, these days parents don’t have much time to spend with their children.

What we as loving parents forgot that it’s not that money or a material is a need of a child, but it is the valuable time in which we can understand our child’s inner-soul and can work accordingly for the overall personality development of the child. However, today’s parental practice is not helping any more to develop moral thoughts and emotions, which is an emotional connection to ideas.

Teachers as the second parent to every child do play a significant role in the overall growth of the child. They can legitimately guide the rightness and wrongness of every action being a role model. Their role should go beyond from the text book curriculum to an insight into the human affairs. There should be counselling sessions or special classes to advocate such humane worth that is real character building tools at an early age.

In the end, media especially electronic have played the most to corrupt young minds with uncensored and unlimited access through movies, violent shows on TV, computer games and those certainly have left adverse impact.

The role of media in ‘nation building’ as the former President APJ Abdul Kalam said is some how lacking and that is just because of our effort and making the story sensational without going to the edge of the moral point.

Hence, there is need of a collective effort from all fronts to take necessary action to avoid reoccurrence of such horrific incident that not only a threat to our culture but also to the future of child as today’s child is tomorrow’s leader of the nation.