As parents, it’s important to understand your children learning potential so you can provide them with the best educational opportunities to learn.

Everybody’s a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’ll spend the rest of its life thinking it’s stupid.

 — Albert

A creative student from Sialkot, Pakistan, takes the matriculation exam but is disqualified by the education board and labelled a failure. He becomes an auto mechanic after failing the examination, but his creative mind won’t let him rest. In his workshop, he begins building an aeroplane. An uneducated person does not understand the fundamentals of mathematics and physics. Works hard and hopes to one day fly a plane — And one day he did this. A person labelled incompetent performs the work of a scientist without assistance. It demonstrates that the child who was failed by our educational system was a bright child.

But how did the education and examination systems fail to recognise him? Our education system only teaches learners in one way, and our examination system only tests learners in the same way. Apart from this method of learning, children are neither taught nor considered students. Rather, it is criticised by parents, teachers, and society, and it is often met with severe physical punishment.

Just as it is important to know children by age, it is important for both parents and teachers to know the child’s learning style. Psychologists ( Neil Fleming’s VARK model) divide learning styles into four types.

1. Visual learners
2. Auditory learners
3. Learning by Reading/writing
4. Kinesthetic learners

Visual learners learn by seeing things, so pictures, videos, and diagrams are important in their education. Some children are auditory learners, which means they learn through sound. Reading/writing learners do the reading and writing practices. Similarly, children with kinaesthetic learning learn by doing or experiencing things.

Our schools and institutions teach only one student. Where the teaching style matched the learner’s style, he read and the children whose learning style did not match the teacher’s style did not and unfortunately wasted.

It is very important to understand that the teaching method is coordinated with the child’s learning method. The learner will be average if the teacher does not reach his/her learning style. Teaching skills are the heartbeat of the teaching process. We are living in an age where we must rethink this. We should provide everyone with a good learning and competitive environment. If the parents, teachers and head of the institution are well involved in the education and training of the student, then such children study successfully۔

How does your child learn

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