Parents in urban India are rather invariably keen to send their child to ‘school’ at the earliest. Their fondest desire is to see their child speaking English at the earliest. Nuclear families, working mothers and other constraints of urban life are also behind these trends. Demands generate supply and there are schools ready to admit even the 30-month-olds in their play schools, nursery sections and kindergarten; all clubbed together as pre-school education. Most of them, without saying so, focus on learning language and arithmetic from day one! There are books, exercise books, worksheets, home work and even project work! So you need a big school bag.
The essential import of pre-school or school-readiness is lost somewhere in the process and, consequently, several other aberrations creep into the process of schooling and growing up. It certainly relates to the recent information given to Parliament that 43 per cent children suffer from back pain, ostensibly due to the load of the school bag! The Constitution of India mandates the state to provide free and compulsory education to all kids till they attain “14 years of age”. It was changed to “six to 14 years of age” in the RTE Act, 2009. However, the state is unwilling to take the responsibility for pre-school education. In effect, it represents an acceptance of the changing reality in education that is characterised by the intense race for private schools on the one hand and severe loss of credibility of public-funded schools on the other. It could also be interpreted as a consequence of socio-cultural transformation that is explicitly linked to the economic status of the parents. The field was left wide open to private entrepreneurs, who lured ‘resourceful’ parents to get their wards admitted in nursery! It became a much sought-after pursuit of parents who could afford to dish out heavy fees, including the ‘banned’ donations and capitation fees! Such practices can always be handled ‘suitably’ by intelligent managements!
These developments also led to two very significant concerns; the age of entry to formal schooling, and the load of the bag that children have to carry! There is also the issue of loss of free-time, and time to play that too stands drastically curtailed, particularly in urban areas. It has been consistently established that better learning, growth and personality development results ‘from playful, as opposed to instructional, approaches to learning in children’. Dr David Whitbread, a Cambridge University Researcher, says: “Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species. It underpins how we develop as intellectual, problem-solving, emotional adults and is crucial to our success as a highly adaptable species”. As urbanisation explodes, opportunities for free play, or organised sports and games are shrinking drastically. Every school time table allocates ‘periods ‘for ‘supervised’ sports and games, which is frequently utilised for other more ’important subjects of study’.
There are several other factors that have impacted these critical aspects of growing up, and these, apart from shrinking play fields and parks, also include a sense of insecurity, traffic, and also the persistent parental pressure. Parents are persistently worried about the complex and competitive world in which their child has to enter in due course.
Not many parents are, or supposed to be, familiar with the adverse consequences of hurrying up formal schooling. Considerable efforts are necessary to generate parental awareness that formal schooling must begin only after five years of age and that pre-schooling in its pedagogically sound version finds a place in the provisions of Right to Education. Further, schools must desist from ‘testing’ their language proficiency and counting skills. Widespread research has indicated that overburdening kids with schooling in initial years leads to stress and even impacts mental health of the learners, which must be taken note of by every school.
J S Rajput
Former director of the NCERT
rajput_js@yahoo.co.in