Of school attendance, fake circulars and 'burning issues'

One of the distinct memories that I have of my kindergarten days was the ceremony which we kids knew would happen everyday. The first thing in the morning, the teacher would open this long book with yellow/green tinted papers in which she would have written all our names in neat handwriting. The whole process was ritualistic - each kid's name being called out with utter solemnity and our expected response -  'Present ma'am'. This would be done once a day (in the morning), though I faintly recollect attendance being taken for the post-lunch sessions as well. This must have happened during my fifth grade. Apparently some of the boys used to go home for lunch and would not return for the rest of the day. 

I tried my best but could not recollect any discussions regarding shortage of attendance between me and my peers. Of course we were kids and this was one lesser thing for us to worry about. Also, at that time, my tiny mind did not definitely deem it to be an issue of epic proportions worthy enough to be discussed on FM radio for about three hours because, well....there were other burning issues.

This morning, I put on my headphones to listen to the customary chatter on FM Radio. Two radio jockeys were discussing a 'burning issue' - an order supposedly issued by the All India Council for Technical Education scrapping the mandatory 75 percent attendance for engineering students'. As I heard the discussion between the rather enthusiastic RJ's (probably they had been engineering students in their earlier avatars? ) and the vindicated listeners (a good majority of whom appeared to be engineering students),  I realised that the debate was turning out to be pretty polarising. 'Is it a good idea to have mandatory 75 % attendance for engineering students?' -this turned out to be  moot point in the trend of the discussion on both the FM channels (till as such time the RJ's realised the goof up).

There were various strands to this debate, most of which can be summed up as follows. First and foremost was notion that after the rigmarole of preparing for the various entrance examinations, it is but natural to consider colleges as fun spaces and therefore, attendance appeared to be an  antediluvian concept in such spaces. Secondly, (and oddly enough) students are old enough to decide whether they would want to attend the classes because they are old enough to decide.  What was also happening was that these notions, with their polarising potential, were preventing a larger and more relevant debate through a brute majority of shallow opinions.

Let's take a step back and try and understand who are the students who 'opt to study' engineering, how are they coached for the entrance exams, what are the pedagogical methods/practices adopted by the corporate colleges who scream from the rooftops about the number of admissions that their institutions have secured, how the same system percolates and is sometimes reinforced in engineering institutions due to the lack of quality faculty and misguided 'vision and mission' of the institutions, and how all of this results in the majority of the institutions churning out frustrated graduates who find it difficult to secure relevant and purposeful employment or find it difficult to pursue higher studies. Answers to such questions would also throw into relief the increasing number of student suicides (both at coaching centres and engineering colleges) and the growing unemployability of the engineering students. And the debate would show that  emphasis on rote learning, inconsistency between the curriculum and industry,  lack of opportunities for relevant internships and vocational projects and limited access to hands-on learning intervene and make this cycle more vicious.

Therefore, we must step beyond the polarising aspect of this debate and understand how the right words and phrases used in the fake order enabled an instant connect with a growing number of disgruntled engineering graduates who are seeing limited scope for their campuses functioning as spaces facilitating a lifetime of learning and fulfilment. While doing so runs the risk of validating the issues raised by the circular (and I doubt if the NSSO indeed conducted such a survey as claimed in fake circular), it should rather be seen as an opportunity to deliberate upon the ways in which engineering education in our country can be made more relevant, purposeful and rewarding. And with the majority of the students in our country 'opting' for engineering, there is a critical need for such an engagement.


PS: This post was originally written in Jan 2018, when the fake AICTE circular started making its rounds. AICTE swung into action and established that the circular was fake.

Of Schools, Dystopian Realities and Mr.G.Neelakantan

One of my neighbour’s joyous exclamation that her toddler
had gained admission into a prominent school (about 20 kilometres away) led me to remember a few incidents that happened while I had been scouting schools for my sons. 

A highly recommended school was about five kilometres away which, to me, was a negotiable distance. However, the day to day affairs were being managed by the personal secretary of the Principal who was ‘missing-in-action’. The prospectus was a cool couple of thousands (school touting ‘prospectus’! ) and there would be a ten-minute interview to classify the tiny tots as ‘normal’ and ‘hyperactive’. Very innocently, I asked if any certified experts would do that and I was shown the door.

At the gate of another prominent school, I was informed by the security to fill up an enquiry form and pay Rs.250 per child before initiating any discussion. In yet another school, the head was nice enough to entertain me for about twenty minutes (it was a newly established school) to claim that the curriculum was drawn from the best practices of CBSE, IGCSE and IB, though they had affiliation for none at that point of time. And who decided on the best practices? I was shown the door yet again.

While at one school I discovered that I would be paying an arm and a leg for international cuisine, I found ‘ayyammas’ surreptitiously devouring food from the snack boxes of pre-primary kids in another. I also saw a school where the toilets did not have proper doors. A friend of mine who found the idea of checking washrooms pretty funny changed her opinion after last year’s incident in the Gurugram school.

The similarity across these schools was nevertheless astounding - in almost all of them (except the one where the ayyammas were eating the food from the snack boxes), the total cost for LKG education for my two sons would have costed me more than I had spent for my entire school education. And at the end of all this, I still had no guarantee that my kids would feel safe. 

The following incidents that happened in the recent times add credence to this — protests by parents in Hyderabad regarding the yearly school fee hike, an 8th grade student committing suicide for not being allowed to write an exam, a child not being allowed to attend classes for wearing the wrong footwear, a group of tiny tots being given TC’s because their parents belonged to a WhatsApp group, a child being mowed down by a school bus, and a child falling into a well in a play school (and the parents thought that their child would be safe there). 

All these incidents, when seen together, reveal two things: despite their well worded intentions and their elevated ‘ethos’, many schools today are sacrificing humanity at the altar of ‘profits’.

Hyderabad is one of the metros where school fees could be the highest (as per some news reports in 2016), and this is more often justified by the infrastructure and of course the ‘snob’ values associated with a particular school. Further, many teachers lack commitment because of two reasons: the monetary compensation is far from motivating, and most of them are not teachers by choice. Therefore, they fall in line with the institutions’ philosophy of running the school either as a resort or as a commercial venture. Some schools resort to in-house training of teachers, the quality of which is often questionable.

Despite the glossy promotional material with the photos of ‘happy kids’ talking about ‘great experiences’, teachers talking about their child-centred pedagogy and globalised curriculum, websites proclaiming qualified and experienced teachers and heads with wide and varied experience, there is a palpable sense that most of the schools today are directionless, rudderless, profit-making enterprises. And this is happening because there is a limited sense of accountability. Even if any exists, governments allow them to be circumvented. 

There is a tragedy waiting to happen — today’s schools are rapidly evolving into dystopian realities. They are rapidly transforming into places where dreams are being defeated… on a daily basis. And no one seems to be concerned. And the situation has become more alarming because schools are now unleashing the most powerful weapon in their arsenal — subtle manipulation. 

One morning, a parent shared that her Grade 2 daughter had written a series of Olympiads. The tiny one didn’t want her mother to talk about her performance and so she hid behind, tugging at her mother and pleading with her to stop the discussion. Oblivious to her daughter’s discomfort, the lady continued talking about how her daughter didn’t do well whereas her cousin in Grade 3 stood first in the school. If you would blame the mother….I would request you to pause and ponder regarding the origin of the mother’s problem. She had obviously seen the online portal of the school where the photos of the toppers were regularly posted. Like many other parents, she was pressurised into enrolling her child for the nerve wracking exams that involve preparation and practice; the parents were expected to train their children with the school’s support being restricted to registering and procuring the preparation material.

Parents who contribute to the school’s initiatives and respond positively to their policies are generally seen as star parents (appreciated during Annual Day/or any other function) whereas a questioning parent is seen as a ‘problem’. Therefore, neither did I raise questions regarding the sensibility of manipulating the tiny tots into writing the Olympiads, nor did I enrol my kids for those tests. In other words, I had developed a thick skin, just like many others. 

At that moment, I could not help but recollect this incident in Chennai. During a parent-teacher meeting, a former colleague of mine told a child’s parents that it was their responsibility to help their grade 2 child learn English at home. Very helpfully, she also suggested that the parents could begin by watching English programs/films and speak to each other in English. There was a problem though — the child was a first generation learner and the parents were vegetable vendors who were working hard to give their child a decent shot at education. In this regard, our prinicipal stated a simple fact to all the teachers - when the kid is in the school 8 hours a day and five days a week, what business does the school have to shove the responsibility of learning onto the parents? That hit a nerve. 

That man was Mr.G.Neelakantan, who was the principal of Sir Sivaswami Kalalaya in 2005. Having worked under his guidance for two years, I have seen him as a true educationist. He would have considered parents as equal stake holders with the school assuming primary responsibility for learning. He would have seen schools as spaces promoting happy learning, not profit-making entities. He would have understood the emotional quotient of children and made sure that they had enough learning experiences to last a lifetime. And he would have done all this without providing an international cuisine or an AC bus. Today, as my children attend school, I wish people like him were around, more particularly in Hyderabad. Then, this tragedy waiting to happen would be nipped in the bud.