Changing face of school education

Some time back a common family friend invited me for a dinner. Our conversation veered towards the couple’s daughter aged about 12. The family was divided in two groups, the father on one side and the mother and daughter on the other, the bone of contention, curriculum that the 12 year old should follow.

The girl is quite a bright kid and is topping her class. She is an all rounder good in sports, studies and all other extra curricular activities. She goes to a school that follows CBSE curriculum. The mother and daughter were not happy with CBSE and wanted to move to an IB school and the father was not in favor of it.

The arguments were quite amusing. I checked with the girl as for the reason for her need to shift to an IB school. She stressed the importance such schools gives for overall personality development, which was absent in her school.

I personally did not feel that the girl lacked personality, she was confident, intelligent and spoke and behaved well for her 12 years of age. On prodding further she confided that many of her friends had shifted to IB schools and she felt left out. IB was fashionable and the in thing.

Her dad a senior executive in a private firm was against such schools. According to him the IB schools curriculum were not challenging enough. He was of the strong opinion that such schools were all style and no substance.

The argument went on, and I was a mute spectator. Post that I started noticing the school bus that came every morning to our society to pick up kids. The suburb of Mumbai where I grew up mostly had subsidized public schools. It was a middle class locality and had concentrations of south Indian population. Needless to say I studied in a school run by one of those south Indian association. It was an aided school and girls studied for free. Boys were charged a nominal amount. The school was affiliated to the state board. There were other schools run by Christian community but they too were aided schools. So private schools were far and few.

I still live in the same locality, but we now have an IB school, countless private schools and the old public schools. Is this an indication of prosperity?

The school that I studied is now a lower middle class school per the new standards. I recently asked a young mother about my school and she said only those who could not afford the fees send their children there. Her daughter goes to a private school. I was curious and checked if the school is an IB school. The daughter immediately and very proudly said yes. But her mother intervened corrected that it was not an IB school but an expensive CBSE private school. The daughter aged about 7 looked upset, possibly realizing that she was not belonging to the elite IB club. She wanted to know why her school was not an IB.

Sensing where the discussion was heading I moved on.

Even among parents the school to which their child goes to has become an indication of their social standing. These parents are part of the so-called new educated middle class in Mumbai and most of them work for MNC’s. Increasing disposable incomes have made such schools affordable and if not affordable, parents pull all stops to ensure that make it available to their kids. One lady told me, when her husband lost her job, her major cause of worry was her kid’s school fees. She cut all corners to ensure that the children continue in the same school, which formed a major chunk of her monthly expenses.

I find kids today are much smarter and knowledgeable, call it generation gap. To what extent the new generation schools have a role to play in making the present kids smarter is something I am unaware of. Our schools were not so good in imparting soft skills or developing our personality but they did make us what we are today. I have to accept it was not easy to face this world, some times we fell flat on our face, at times we stumbled, but we learned to pick ourselves up We survived and we excelled.