Many new things are in the air right now, and among them is a new attitude to children. I would date it as a post Covid phenomenon, though one that gathered up speed and form in the immediate years before.
Children were always an investment, a sign of one’s status and identity, and a constructor of modernity. That is not new. What is striking today is the vehemence with which these understandings of children are being adopted and demonstrated. It’s like a race about who can show, not only the best child, but now, the best understanding of the best child. The existing discourse of the child had already erased the individual personhood of the child and replaced it with an idea and a belief. The present discourse is far more aggressive. It’s ready to become abusive and even wage war about itself, about the sanctity of the discourse.
Let me illustrate with a story or two. A couple came to the school office to buy the books and notebooks for their son who was already admitted and sitting in in class 3. The father was a silent type though fully alert to the exchange that ensued, carried on totally on their side by the wife.
Mother (on receiving the bundle of books) What! You have only four books in class 3!
The Principal They, er, have only four subjects. English, Hindi, Maths, EVS (Environmental Studies)
Mother How can that be? In English itself there are Grammar and Workbooks. Then there is GK and Moral (General Knowledge and Moral Science) and Sanskrit and Computers.
The Principal We teach all that. We don’t have a textbook for everything, however.
I was sitting nearby and could not resist. I introduced myself and told them about our Library and our teaching techniques, specifically the one called “teaching beyond the textbook.”
Mother Fine! Show me your Library!
I escorted her upstairs, pointed out some things, and let her browse. She would pick up a book at random, stare at it and return it in a hurry.
Mother Children can’t do Library!
Me Of course they can! They do! It’s one of their favourite things.
Mother It’s too difficult for them. How can they understand?
More of a similar dialogue ensued and I dropped it. A day later, they withdrew their child because, according to her, we had all kinds of useless activities, such as Library, and we did not ‘do’ enough ‘academics.’ We certainly did not have enough textbooks, only books in some incomprehensible place called “the Library.”
The mother, we discovered later, was educated only till class XII. Her confidence matched that of a post-graduate and her conviction that of an experienced educator. Had she been a middle class urban resident instead of a villager from a farming family, her attitude would have been similar. Suddenly, all kinds of parents, of all classes and locations, have come together in their hyperactive concerns for the child. The concerns are inversely linked to knowledge about children and childhood, knowledge and learning.
Other stories are sadder still. Parents, in increasing numbers, are changing their children’s birth certificates to state a later birth date. Thus a six year-old effectively becomes a four year-old; a five year-old becomes a three year-old. There must be a flourishing industry in the Municipal office for this because it is happening smoothly and hugely. Nor are the parents apologetic about it. In the beginning our school would refuse to cooperate and we talked to them at length how it was wrong for the child. They would withdraw their child. Then we would put question marks and discuss at length among ourselves as to what course to adopt. Now we simply ask with a straight face, “Is this birth certificate the real one or a manufactured one?” And they reply, with an equally straight face, “Oh, it’s made up.”
Changing the date of birth of the child is not followed up by putting the child in a lower class. The (newly minted) four year-old will still sit in class 1, insist the parents. There are children born last year, pardon the exaggeration, who are in Kindergarten. For the odd parent who doesn’t mind which class their child is in, probably because of total denial of the usefulness of knowing anything at all about school practices, the school may transfer the (now) seven year old to class II—except that the child still looks big, true to their ten years of age.
It would all be material for satire and humour, were it not so pathetic. Pathetic as a testimony to parents’ worries; tragic for children’s development.
As a school we get it that the primary consideration on a parent’s mind is success in academics so that the child may carve out a desirable career in the future. The whole school, in our case, is set up to change the bad practices in Indian education which lead to children’s failure. Our single-minded effort is to make children succeed. But succeed happily. They are individuals, not tools of the family, community, or nation. They learn and respond in different ways. The negotiate and manoeuvre. They love and hate. They have strengths and weaknesses. We want to give them all ultimate respect and dignity and make them partners in the learning that we have designed to mould them into happy, successful adults.
Try explaining that to a nervous, worry-racked parent. Like patients burdened by maladies they cannot understand who rush from one medical practitioner and system to another, parents compare schools endlessly, discuss agitatedly, withdraw and admit children, and fight in school offices. They believe that the very size of their worry means that they are now taking the immense trouble needed to resolve it. The tested ways to resolve it is—textbooks and tutors.
Children are caught up in the pincer grips of this adult dilemma. The real problem is that most schools are not equipped to deal with the hyper competitive system of today’s professional world. But all parents had to do was to insist on better education by the school. Instead, every parent thinks that the solution is to extend the school life of the child by rendering them younger, make their bags heavier with books, and alongside, send them for ‘coaching’ from the age of two. That would mean the age of four or five, enough of a travesty.
Meanwhile, they fight with any progressive school that may exist, such as ours, about the needs of the child. It’s become the strangest battle. We already were fighting the system of entrenched practices and the might of dogmatic parents, but now we have a new ruining of children by harnessing them to more textbooks than ever before, more extra coaching classes, more worry clogging every pore. We have to fight worries, hauntings, panics.
Imagination, Pain, Anger, and Love. 