On Schooling ...

Entering the portals of an educational institution is one of those and holy functions which one comes across in life. While we kids tagged along with our parents on their professional sojourns, I managed to change eight schools till matriculation. Every other year, I was staring into a class room with a bunch of strangers. By the time, I have made friends, it was always time to move on. This continued into college, but I found some stability in engineering college where, it was the same environs for four formative years. What had never occurred too seriously at least in my mind was – was I going to the right institutions? Well, I guess I did not care less as a student…

But this seems like a whopping question in the minds of parents of my generation, who do everything short of hiring a consultant to help them identify a framework to identify the right educational institution for their toddlers. I guess as concerned parents, everyone has the right to choose the best ecosystem which suits the value system of their family. Broadly if you look at the options in front of them, I get eager to put it into a framework.

There are essentially four categories of schools which the parents look that
# International Schools
# Indian schools modeled on International syllabus
# New concept schools – innovative teaching methods
# Traditional schools teaching the state, central syllabus

International Schools have always been of attraction from the point of view of internationally ‘exposed’ course material and boasts of having been tried and tested in lots of geographies. It does make sense for kids whose parents travel abroad for extended periods and the family migrates temporarily for these periods. Some semblance of continuity is required. For the social elite, it is also a matter of prestige to put their kids in these schools as it adds to their social resume, makes a statement of their financial with the steep rates they pay as fees. The second category are the wannabes ; they take up franchisees and at times the blends the positive from the international schools and try to also build in the best from our age old rigmarole like exams and homework.

The new concept schools are what the name suggests – New Concepts. Somewhere they try to bring in the oldest Indian forms of gurukuls and build in some of the old scriptures of learning in the tutoring format. We also hear concepts like ‘green learning’ and several others in the experimental mode.

The last is the regular school a lot of us have been to. Big classes, entrance interviews even for nursery, tons of homework, class tests, annual exams , competition, teacher pressure blah blah.

So, what did I choose for my daughter? The fourth category. Why? Not a very complicated consultant reply. I wanted her to appreciate competition – the fact that however unique you are as a person, you will have to compete for every other accolade in life. ‘Appreciating someone who has done well’, easier said than done – it takes a lot more to step back and appreciate someone else’s success and respect someone who has beat you to it. Our standard run of mill school sets the stage for those realisations. It is for the individual to develop on those and build his or her own value system...