IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO RAISE A CHILD

As you all know, I’m very concern about education and parenting. A quote that always stay in my heart: “It takes a village to raise a child”

It means a lot, that even though as a parent you are the 1st teacher and the most influential guidance for your children, but when in comes to social life, how and who your child spend time with can affect his/her behaviour. I can tell you on and on about a bad influence TV program, game and some times even when your child is not exposed to any of those I’ve mentioned, but when his/her friends are and they behaviour is quite worrying, at the end of the day you can still discuss those things with your child so he/she knows which is good or not.

And of course, as the second teacher and where your child spend most of his days: School. I have already write a blog post about mainstream education in Indonesia (especially Jakarta). With the tense competitiveness in education industry (yes I wrote it right, Industry) where schools are trying hard to get high score and add more titles to its’ name such as: national plus or even “better” to sell: international school, these supposedly educator forget the main thing education must do: to draw out the innate capabilities one’s have. And most important thing: to raise a human being, not a high score achiever.

After years of searching, and while preparing my husband and I for home schooling, we found Gemala Ananda. This school really what I’ve dreamt of a school (if I were given the opportunity to serve students). You can read it why: here.

I am so thankful for Gemala Ananda head master’s vision about education. And her consistency through out the years (I found this school when Aaron was 2,5 years old, and had a tiny weeny worry that the school could shut down, because of it’s “weirdness”).

Not only the school is awesome, the parents in this school are super awesome too. As for Aaron’s class- Kelas 1 Karl Benz (this year they named their classes based on well known inventor), we tried -very hard- between the busy work and crazy traffic of Jakarta, to spend time together. To get to know each other. Because we believe that education is not only school’s responsibility, but the children’s parents first and of course our children’s friends and their parents.
Thank you for the efforts to spend the holiday together, thank you for being so humble and honest. Thank you for being crazy just the way you are.

Let’s raise our children, together we build our village.

Warm hugs,

mommy Aaron