“The child is capable of enormous learning if given the opportunity,” assures the author. She introduces a teaching/learning approach that capitalises on ‘the understanding gained from the latest research in developmental psychology of the creative potential of children’.

For instance, a chapter on the experiences with tribal children has fascinating insights. Such as, that “they needed longer time to warm up to us and feel comfortable in a learning situation. They needed more encouragement for them to express their thoughts and feelings freely,” Kapur narrates.

“The fact that the teachers routinely used the stick as a teaching aid did not help! The tribal children were not at all aggressive. They were in fact most friendly once they got to know you.” (A point that adds poignancy to the anguish we feel seeing the outrageous visuals in the day’s newspapers, about the inhuman violence against Adivasis in Guwahati.)

“Initially, they were anxious and fearful of strangers and their teachers,” adds Kapur, recounting the phases that the tribal children went through, in the learning experiments. “The teachers themselves acknowledged that they often punished the children because they were poor learners.”

She reminisces how her father Shivarama Karanth, a novelist, was “interested in everything around but was specially disillusioned about the teaching methods in our schools way back in the 1950s.”

Nostalgically Kapur describes: “He set up a school for rural children, prepared materials to make reading enjoyable and capitalised on the children’s creativity to make them good learners. He was way ahead of his time in progressive ideas by decades, to be acceptable in the field of education at that point of time.”

The author recalls how her father would tell her stories every night for one hour, year after year, till she told him to stop as she could read them herself. “Learning to read and write came so easily to me that I do not even recall being taught formally.”

Alas, we have so few teachers, and even less motivated, committed and good teachers, rues Kapur. “I have the conviction that children can create their own world of learning if time and space is provided,” she declares.

“It stands to logic if children have such tremendous creative potential — and all we have in the schools are children — why can we not tap this natural resource?”

The book urges teachers to learn more from children, “as children think for themselves, work on their own and are more creative and imaginative than adults.” A precondition, however, is that the teacher should have ‘a healthy respect for the child’s individuality and creativity.’ Teachers would need to ‘teach less, prepare less and punish less’ in child-friendly learning situations.

The traditional ‘pyramid of learning’ has teacher at the top and children at the bottom, with outcomes that are minimal, boring and non-creative. Instead, place children (the resource) at the top of the pyramid and have the community at the foundation, exhorts Kapur. So, where are the teachers? In the middle, she says, as ‘catalysts’.

A book that can make most adults bemoan what they missed out as children.