Implementation holds the key

The educational landscape in India has long been populated by entities often deemed surplus. Coaching centres, with their promises and assurances, have frequently lured students away from formal education, making exaggerated claims.

With arrows fired to target young students’ anxieties, we tend to trust these centres, brandished with banners quoting success rates in (un)objective terms.

Early coaching often comes at the expense of well-being, bombarding students with taxing schedules and undue pressures in a climate that already exhorts competition.

As a result, children find themselves contemplating futures and seeking specialisation at a time when they should be questioning why grass is green.

Essentially, the coaching game is more a lucrative market of questionable promises than an alternative form of education, capitalising on the anxieties of vulnerable children seeking to satiate their family’s lust for an overall A grade.

One of the several ramifications of the decision could be an exponential spike in enrolment rates across schools, with more students heading to formal institutions rather than being clamped to other students with predetermined life trajectories and similar dreams and dilemmas.

However, taking into account the education system prevalent in our country, isn’t stress imminent? Schools of our day and age focus more on churning out statistics than individuals. The outcome, across all possibilities, will largely remain the same-children seeking to morph into numbers that sprouted legs. The success of the guidelines is contingent upon their enforcement, which still remains a question.

The efficacy and monitoring of enforcement remains uncertain, particularly due to the informal character of transactions and hushed conversations that transpire between coaching centres and perturbed parents.

Nonetheless, private tutors can still offer their services, so the question of holistic development and well-being is still under scrutiny.

If we truly seek to reform education and help it revert to the identity of a process rather than a result-based system, we need to understand that academics, while essential, aren’t synonymous with education. The process should be all-encompassing rather than one poorly hinged on numbers and comparisons.

Mallik Arjun Ahluwalia,

Class XI, Yadavindra Public School, Patiala