This Summer, send your Kids to Work at a Mylapore store. Or train with scientists off Adyar estuary.

 

We know this. Our children need all those lessons and lectures in the classroom.

But the hands-on training is priceless.

Summer time holidays can be learning and earning time.

In school, Dad invited me to a fortnight’s work at his company’s godown of medicines. Pasting stickers on bottles. It got me some pocket money. I also learnt how to interact with contract labour. Lessons that held well when I ran my business.

In college, training at a rag of a weekly newspaper, my Ed sent me down to the print shop floor. Two lessons learnt - the mental outlook of press staff and the ideas that the pre-press team had about layouts suggested by the Ed.

And just after college, at The Indian Express, assigned to produce the weekly Cinema page, many lessons learnt on the pre-press floor. You allowed the staff to feast on the film stills and then worked hand-in-hand in designing the page. And here, I learnt the importance of ‘white space’ in design - from those veterans.

There are many ways in which our teens can spend some days this May, on hands-on education. For example, turn to some institutions whom we must request to ‘open’.

Can our Mylapore zone colleges let their laboratories be learning zones for seven our ten days for schoolers?

Check in with The Zoological Survey of India, the Central Institute of Brackishwater Aquaculture, and The Sanskrit College. Would they admit schoolers to short-term training on campus?

Sign up for some real shop-experience. For all those whose interest is management, finance, accountancy and retail.

Send your sons and daughters to say, Vivek or Giri Trading. Send them to the neighbourhood restaurant or pharmacy. Offer your young one’s services to the local bakery like Winners or a supermarket like White Rose.

Imagine the amazing experience the young ones will have across seven days. The education and the challenges. And perhaps they will also be paid some pocket money! And be give a certificate of experience.

Any sensible educator and employer will appreciate this record of a young one.

This takes me to an anecdote my colleague Parameshwaran shared sometime ago. Walking down a Mylapore inner street, he heeded a ‘Saar!” call; he turned and recognised a youth sitting behind the cash register of a pharmacy. 

This boy had attended a course on the basics in computers at a school that Mylapore Times Charitable Trust runs in a local school. He had discontinued studies and his basic skills got him this job.

What do you think of the ideas I have bounced here? Share your thoughts here!

<< Photo: Stella Maris College art/design students at Nageswara Rao Park, curating an event