Stores and children's education

The visit of our very dear friends, neighbors, and colleagues from Tsukuba, Joey and Ning Ibarra and their two lovely, energetic and active children JL and Jigs reminded us of our plan years, years ago related to the role of commercial stores for the education of children.

I remember trying to convince some department stores in Quezon City then to adopt child-friendly corners. Particularly, with the help of artists and designers and with the consent and participation of the department store owners and personnel, we suggested the rearrangements of their products and spaces as child-friendly activity and education zones.

The conventional view sees department and other types of stores as merely commercial units. We saw the stores, however, as active agents and partners for education, especially children's education.

Perhaps to make the concept visually clearer, the present National Bookstore at the Ayala Shopping Center has allotted some space where children can sit on the floor and enjoy the books that the store have generously shared for the children to enjoy. National Bookstore can probably expand the concept to invite enthusiastic and effective story tellers to read certain books or stories to the children for their greater enjoyment and wider imagination!

Department stores can allot certain spaces for different learning and educational activities for those interested to learn, especially among our children. They can, for example, have an activity zone where certain sports goods that they are selling - for example, small bikes, balls, others - can be shared with children to enjoy, either for free or for a reasonable fee. Of course, the stores will have to elicit the participation and partnership of manufacturers and concessionaires to have some of their products made available for the use and enjoyment of the children inside the stores.

The stores can put up a discovery zone that will adopt certain themes that can change on a regular basis. The goal of the discovery zone is to make the children learn about certain themes; the universe, plants, animals, stones, numbers, colors etc. Then the discovery zone can be designed in such a way that the themes are allowed to be shared with the learners. A computer-friendly section may also entice children to be better supervised in better educational games by again, knowledgeable partners who can share their knowledge about these games and computers with the children.

The stores can also put up a special music zone where children can be guided by volunteer or hired musician guests or just allowed to learn what musical instruments are available and what they sound like, what they are for, and what beautiful sounds they can make if they only give their time, interest and attention for practice. Again, rather than have the instruments just encased for display and beyond the reach of the children, the stores can have sample music-related products be shared, touched, and experienced by the children.

The objective is to have the children go through a meaningful learning experience while they are in stores. Commercial stores can go beyond just mere business goals - the stores can be transformed, without any extra costs, into significant learning centers/zones for children's education. The zones can be geared towards assisting other groups and partners expand and widen children's capacity to learn. The zones can also be conceptualized to teach the children to be more disciplined in the sharing and in the experience of using the products generously provided by the stores for their use. The zones may even charge reasonable rates in exchange for very creative learning moments and experiences for the children.

We are sure parents will not hesitate to bring their children to malls and especially child-friendly stores where they can see for themselves how their children can continue to learn as they go through the stores. With children happy with the products shared by the stores with them, it is very easy to see many, if not all of them, nagging, begging, asking their parents to buy the goods for them from the child-friendly stores.

We wonder if there will be more stores that will want to experiment and adopt this child-friendly concept and agree to be among the active partners for the education of our children from now on.

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