5 Educational Implications of Growth and Development are described below:
1. Education is not only a process and a product of growing, it means growing. It aims at the fullest possible realisation of all the potentialities of children. This implies that teachers and parents must know what children are capable of and what potentialities they possess. Equipped with this knowledge they should provide suitable opportunities and favourable environmental facilities which are conducive to the maximum growth of children. Apart from these opportunities, it is necessary that their attitudes are helpful, encouraging and sympathetic.
2. School programmers, procedures and practices should be adjusted to the growth and maturational levels of children, bearing in mind the individual variations in rates of growth. Since various aspects of growth are interrelated, parents and teachers should pay attention to all aspects. Good physical growth, for example, through the provision of play, games and sports, is conducive to effective intellectual development; malnutrition has been found to be an important factor that retards development: hence, teachers and parents should cooperate in cultivating among pupils habits of balanced eating.
3. The principles of development have highlighted the importance of “individual differences” from one child to the other and from one stage to another. This fact justifies the provision of diversified courses for the development of specific talents, abilities and interests and a rich and varied programme of co-curricular activities. Similarly, the curricular activities should be based on the needs and interests of various stages of growth i.e., childhood, boyhood or later childhood, pre- adolescence and adolescence.
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4. Each stage of growth has its possibilities and limitations. This implies that teachers and parents should not demand of pupils or children what is beyond their stage of growth. If they do so, they will only cause frustrations, heighten tension and nervousness in children. For example, it is wrong to expect a primary school child to appreciate abstract concepts and theories.
5. The ‘inter-relatedness of growth’ demands presentation of knowledge in an interrelated manner and its integration with action. Since each child grows in his own unique way, it is but opposite that parents and teachers should treat each child as a unique individual and provide for this special needs and interests.