Reading the World Before Facing It: Is Your Child Ready to Face the World?

Learning Forward Retreat, 14-16 July 2026, at the Fig Tree Cottage in Dehradun

We are delighted to host educators from Sunbeam Schools - Suncity, Bhawanpur, Lahartara and Varuna; and the Aasara Trust for an immersive learning experience. Discover more at www.LFIN.Academy.

Having seen many kids grow up in a residential educational setting. As an educator myself, I wonder whether we prepare our children only to score high marks or to face the world outside.

Is Your Child Ready to Face the World? by Dr Anupam Sibal gave me ample time to think about this subject.

The most important thing about this book was that it took us from academic excellence to character excellence in a refreshing way. In times when we measure success by marks and ranks alone, this book reminds us of the significance of humility, courage, compassion, gratitude, honesty, and forgiveness in life.

I was impressed by the chapter titled Humility because it showed that, regardless of how much we know, there is still more to learn and someone from whom we can learn. This helps us educators stay open to new thoughts and perspectives.

Handling Pressure is a particularly relevant topic in today’s world. It reinforced my belief that resilience and emotional well-being should be considered equally important as the quality of performance at school.

Among all the chapters, Making Mistakes and Accepting Flaws impressed me the most. We tend to teach our kids to aim for excellence, but it is rarely achieved that way. One learns by making mistakes, analysing them, and trying again.

Chapters on Compassion, Giving, and Making Others Happy made me realise that our ultimate goal as educators is not to make kids more knowledgeable and successful academically, but to make them better people. The intelligence will open many doors, but only your attitude towards other people will show how you use them. But I think the most important message the book conveyed to me was expressed in the chapters on Gratitude and Forgiveness. In a world where everyone tries to acquire something, gratitude shows how much we can appreciate what we have, and forgiveness frees us from hate and anger. As an educator, I understood that our ultimate goal is not just to teach children to pass exams, but also to prepare them for their lives and relationships with others.

If I were to summarise my learning from this book in one sentence, it would be:

The world does not merely need successful individuals; it needs compassionate, resilient, honest, and responsible human beings.

Reading this book has strengthened my belief that the real purpose of education is not simply to help children make a living, but to help them make a life.

And perhaps that is the true answer to the question the book asks:

Is our child ready to face the world?

The answer depends not only on what they know, but on who they become.

out preparing for life.

 - Deeba Naqvi, Apeksha Malviya and Anurag Khanna from Sunbeam Group of Educational Institutions, Varanasi, and Manisha Bhandari from the Aasara Trust at Dehradun.