The science of motion that creates the chemistry of adrenalin working in our minds, bodies, and souls is very important to feel alive. You can make your choice to be the traditional Jack who had SO much work that the lack of play made him a dull boy. In the age of the laptop, when every kid is busy flying kites on the visual display unit rather than doing the same under the blue sky while feeling the breeze through the greens brushing across his face, the importance of sports on the field can hardly be exaggerated.
The limitations of classroom teaching were felt in the 20th century by Tagore when he decided that true learning could take place in the shade of the trees rather than the suffocating surroundings of the claustrophobic classrooms. Perhaps the same idea echoed the minds of the Vedic rishis when the upanishadic pattern of teaching in the Vedic period necessitated the peaceful, green, and open presence of the ashrams or ‘asramas’. This was a time when equal stress was laid on the development of the mind and the body.
The ideal gentleman was expected to be a balanced combination of intellectual as well as physical dexterity. The present obsession with the power of the intellect and the unlimited financial bliss that accompanies the same, however, makes it possible for a wimp of a person to masquerade as a gentleman. Thus the absence of physical fitness in the modern man has reached the level where his chivalry is limited to killing cockroaches. The absence of sports paralyses a man’s ability to be a part of the physical evolution that takes place in Nature so quietly and this is so obvious.
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But the importance of classroom teaching and the usefulness of the traditional lecture method whereby a student has the opportunity of evolving intellectually have also been proved. Mere assertion of sports on the open field being a more useful tool of learning would not do for then you shall have to do a lot trying to negate the intellectual giants who have vindicated the usefulness of the classroom teaching in the 19th and the 20th centuries across the world.
But the problem arises when we shut our eyes to the bitter experiences of millions of other students who have been frustrated with the limitations of classroom teaching and those include people like Albert Einstein and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. While the former gained depreciation from his history teacher for being a nuisance in the class, the latter ended up violently reacting to the insults showered on the Indian community by a British Professor at Presidency College.
The examples above are important because they tell us clearly that though classroom teaching has its obvious advantages of being in an enclosure where one can focus his mind in a convenient silence that encourages concentration, the advantages involved in other methods of imparting lessons can hardly be neglected.
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Perhaps this is the reason that so many educational institutions are waking up to the necessity of sports in our lives and trying to make people understand that it is not extra-curricular but co-curricular activities that we are looking forward to as an important part of the holistic development of the child who spends about fourteen most useful and formative years of his life in these institutions.
The importance of sports in this context can hardly be exaggerated because sports is the ultimate proof of your caliber that cannot be paralysed by individual or subjective prejudices. Theoretical lectures , for most students, prove nothing but bore one to death unless one is interested in the philosopher’s obsession with the typically hair-splitting reflection on the nature of theoretical and practical reality. Such reflection, however, is so typical of wannabe polymaths.
Swami Vivekananda once said that a football match can prove to be more useful than a complex and endless debate on Vedantic philosophy. The point is obvious. The football match shall develop the virtues of patience, self-confidence, discipline, teamwork, leadership, respect for the limitations of time, co-ordination of the mind, body, and spirit reflected in a split second of brilliant reflex action and so on.
No intellectually dense theoretical discussion in Ilk the classroom can deal with such complex challenges because what you are dealing with here is tough and uncompromising reality and that cannot be tamed according to the sweet will of the teacher or the student through hypothetical sophisms. More importantly, you can witness the positive effects of peer pressure on the sports field.
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A diffident or nervous child, perhaps ignored in the Mathematics or English classes because of his reticence being misunderstood as an instance of arrogance, cannot help getting a feel of kicking the ball or executing a swashbuckling cover-drive because there are a hundred of his pals and some dear teacher of his urging him to make it large.