The school status syndrome

After nine years, I can still vividly recall the day I took my three-year-old son to be admitted to an elite school on the outskirts of a prominent town in Tamil Nadu. My reason for choosing a premium school reflected the thoughts of most of the middle- and upper-middle-class lot in the country: to provide everything to our offspring that we think we missed out on during our school days. Another reason could be to rub shoulders with that colleague who is proud of his child’s school and a third reason could be that the Indian yardstick of a good school is where children wear smart jackets and speak fluent English (irrespective of what is being spoken).

On the day of admission, the principal, who could read my hesitation, directed her assistant to take me on a campus tour. It began with the play area for pre-KG kids. We then covered the air-conditioned classrooms, the sophisticated restrooms, music classes with individual cubicles, the gymnasium, the dance studio and the swimming pool. The staff member who accompanied me was pretty conscious of her accent, which made her feel like a marketing expert trying to sell the building to me. After each description, she would watch me carefully, then continue with the confidence that I would fall for at least one of their baits.

I had to consider the fees for two kids and that could take up my entire salary, so I started thinking, “These grapes are too sour”. A period is about forty-five minutes in a typical school. A walk for the whole class to get in and out of the music class on the other floor could easily consume fifteen minutes. It could take another half hour for the instruments to be tuned and how would everyone get their turn?

I also recalled my school days, in the late 1990s, and what followed when computer classes were introduced. The whole class would be taken to the air-conditioned computer lab. Half the class waited outside for its turn as there were not enough computers. Most of us only got a few seconds to touch the mouse and move the cursor, before it would be time to wrap up. We wrote our exams based on theory, drawing flowcharts from rote learning than by practice.

Today, ‘international schools’ are mushrooming across the country. Apart from the government-prescribed fee, which exists merely on paper, payment categories in many schools include gym fee, facility fee, Annual Day fee, music class fee, robotics fee, abacus fee, and so on.

As a language teacher working for a private university, I have come across parents who have sent their kinds to some of the leading ‘international schools’. They approach me for home tuition. My interactions with a few of those students made me content with my own kids’ school choices. With all the money, luxury, and sophistication, there were students from Class 6 or Class 7 who could barely read a passage fluently. The teachers in these elite schools seem to have raced ahead with the more bright students, leaving the other lot far behind. Parents try to help slower wards catch up by spending more money on tuition.

My wife has teaching experience in more than one premium private school. The experience she shares at the end of the day helped me get a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes. The day before a parent-teacher meeting, a representative of the management instructs teachers not to share the students’ negative aspects or shortcomings with the parents. The overburdened teachers, who are often not well-paid, are asked to come well-dressed and presentable, approach parents with a smile, and not defend themselves even if parents are rude to them.

The drama reaches its peak during the final minutes of the last period. Just before the final bell, the kindergarten kids are drilled to say “Thank you, teacher” and then handed over to their parents. Of course, this etiquette needs to be taught, but many a time things are done only to satisfy the parent, who is the payer of fees. When teachers are asked not to chide kids of wealthy parents, the adage ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ becomes ‘Spare the word and spoil the child’.

The purpose of education is to cultivate wisdom, mould character, and enhance humility. Our current schooling system would do well to remember that.

praneshkumarr@gmail.com