Parents in their desire for perfection often help their children in pre-primary or primary classes with their art and craft, defeating the purpose of learning by experience, said teachers.
The practice was always there but it has only intensified during the online classes and the handicap of the medium does not allow teachers to monitor beyond a point.
In several schools separate periods are allotted for craft classes and while children enjoy dabbling with colours or sticking pieces of paper, teachers said it helped to bring out the creativity in children and improved their motor control.
Teachers insist that when a child is doing it whether it’s a three-year-old or a nine-year-old it is the “work of the child” where colours may be flowing out of the line or papers are not synchronized.
“If a child is doing it the craft cannot be perfect but parents help them because they want everything to be perfect,” said Nupur Ghosh, the vice-principal of Mahadevi Birla World Academy.
Jessica Gomes Surana, the principal of Loreto Convent Entally, said on many occasions the end product was “beyond the age of the child”. “Learning is a gradual experience and they would learn by making mistakes,” she said.
“The craft is not done in isolation but for them to learn by doing it. For example, if they are making a stilt house they are also learning about it which is lost if the parents make it for them. Parents have to be addressed time and again that the experience is important for the child,” said Ghosh.
A pre-primary teacher with more than two decades of experience said any kind of drawing or artwork improved the “motor control of the child”, because a child like an adult would not exercise their fingers.
“The fact that the child enjoys the activity helps the creativity to come to the forefront. It leads to imagination which is so much more important than directed work. But if the parents are behind them and keep on interfering or helping them the purpose gets lost,” the teacher said.
Teachers said they had to give freedom to the child to colour or make as they wish because that was his or her perception.
Teachers said they could easily make out the difference between a child's work and that of an adult.
“In online classes, it has gone up because in school they would be doing it in front of their teachers, which is not the case here,” said Ghosh.
On some occasions teachers in their remarks try to make the parents understand.
“We tell them that we reward the effort of the child, not how the craft has turned out. We also have to understand that not all children would be inclined to it but their effort needs to be recognized,” said Angela Ghose, the acting principal, Scottish Church Collegiate School, Kestopur.