Impossible goals for kids
The famous poem by TS eliot, ‘The Wasteland’, begins with: ‘April is the cruellest month…’ As a student, I used to think March was the cruellest month because it was the time of final exams, the terror of students all over the country. The brain-fever bird, with its plaintive cry, is an early marker of the days that follow. How can we ever forget those harsh alarms set by anxious parents, the misery of leaving a warm bed and the fear that one is not prepared? So deep is this trauma that even now, when I am well past that stage, I get nightmares about an exam that I am about to take, only to discover it is about an unknown subject.
Recurring nightmares aren’t the only psychological legacy. Every other day, one reads of a student committing suicide because he cannot take the stress any more or knows that he is never going to make it through that fiercely competitive exam like the JEE. The Kota phenomenon needs a wider study and serious rectification. While the owners of these teaching shops are laughing all the way to the bank, parents who are dying for their children to become ‘successful’ and earn a mega million salary, are pushed into making insane sacrifices. When will they ever accept that not every child is a Sundar Pichai and that money is not everything? I suppose it is easy for someone like me to pontificate since I no longer have a personal stake in this crazy system, but I do wish to share my concern over where we are headed as a society and as a country if we mindlessly pursue impossible goals for our children.
Mind you, it isn’t that this madness afflicts just the pre-JEE generation because the seeds of this syndrome are sown right from the nursery stage. Children as young as three are forced to get up before they have completed their sleep, stuffed into clothes, loaded with satchels that contain their tiffin, fruit and water bottles and dragged bawling to the bus that will ferry them and scores of other unhappy babies to spend three hours in a pre-school creche. Very likely, here they will be prepared to face the interview for admission into the school their parents ardently wish them to enter.
Do such parents even consider what it will mean to a child to become aware of failure even before he is properly potty-trained? Just recently, Prof Krishna Kumar, one of our foremost educationists, wrote about the burden we have placed on our children. He referred to a moving speech made by RK Narayan, a writer who understood and celebrated childhood so well. Many will recall an early tele-serial which was based on his novel, ‘Swamy and Friends’, which remains among my most favourite. Playing in dusty village fields with a gang of neighbourhood friends, India saw the carefree life in a small village and fell in love with its residents. Though the focus was Swamy and his naughty friends, there were a host of characters we encountered: schoolmasters, crabby old men, loving grandmothers, postmen and local grocery shops… the list was long and riveting. It uncovered for many of our generation who had never lived in a village or even a small town, the innocent and delightful world of little India.
RK Narayan’s moving Rajya Sabha speech, as he ended his tenure there, inspired Prof Yash Pal, a legendary scientist, to start a movement for lightening the burden of the satchel that schoolchildren lugged each morning. What followed was a series of recommendations to review school textbooks and curricula. Later, schoolchildren were not detained until they reached Class 8 to relieve them of repeated exams and to encourage them to spend as long as they could in a school. Whether these noble policy initiatives worked or not is a separate question. Free meals in government schools was another good introduction to tackle hunger and malnutrition. However, whether these meals were actually edible or hygienically prepared was never properly monitored.
Come now to the enormous amount of useless information that schools are stuffing down unwilling throats. Forget the tampering with right or left versions of history, I am appalled that several new subjects, such as commerce, legal studies and computer programming (to name just a few) have entered school curricula. Naturally, with so many subjects to study, basic information is all that is possible for a teacher to pass on. Many good subjects (ethics and moral science) are tossed out because they are laden with religious overtones. So, throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Study after study shows how ill-educated our children have become. Many cannot do simple arithmetic, read or spell correctly. They learn early on to discard what they will never need: so geography, music, poetry are subjects no longer in fashion. Computers and online teaching have made the class teacher a remote figure instead of being a counsellor and a guru in the true sense. Tagore’s Santiniketan and his open-air classes in the lap of nature are dismissed as unworkable now. Ironically enough, the very parents who bemoan the ills of the modern school system are also the ones who push their children the hardest.
Time was when we laughed at the soccer moms in the American suburbs, now there are karate, tennis, cricket moms in almost every Indian gated community. Did someone say Vishwaguru?
