Admissions form.
Academic Year 2018-19.
School Name: Very hard to get into school for very famous people’s children.
Dear Parent,
Congratulations on answering question 1 of the admissions form. You have been selected to proceed to the next question. Please be advised, that for every additional question you are selected to answer, there is an additional admission form fee of `5,000 to be paid. The environmentally friendly Koi Fish pond needs to be Feng Shui compliant so as not to bring any bad chi upon the Koi. Once again, the Koi say ‘Thank You.’
What do you think your child’s education should equip him/her for?
Was it Albert Einstein who said ‘Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think?’ Or was it me? I’m pretty sure it was me.
Education is not something that ends with school or college (though I may run out of organs to sell if I have to budget for more than 16 years of formal education.) Learning is a life long pursuit and I believe that a child’s education must help them discover their latent desire to learn. However deep and hard to find that desire may be. Use an excavator if you have to.
You won’t have that problem with Vicky-Christy-Barcelona, who is an abundantly curious child. Why, only last week she stuck her head under the skirt of a mannequin at Prada and declared that she couldn’t find Aunty’s Ding Dong. She then proceeded to rummage around looking for the ding dong, in a manner that reminded me of my last pelvic exam. Education must stoke this curiosity, but preferably in a less public manner that forces me to buy a last season skirt at full price.
Education is not just about writing exams and going to an Ivy League college so that your parents can slap a ‘My Daughter is in Stanford’ bumper sticker on the car and wear $70 sweatshirts emblazoned with school emblems to annoy the neighbours whose children went to tier 2 colleges. Education must be holistic and harness all of Vicks’ multiple intelligences (and personalities) to mould her into the concert level violin playing, horse riding, Japanese-Mandarin-Klingon speaking (who knows where we’ll be living in the latter half of this century?), modern interpretive dancing, global problem solver of the future.
To truly be able to answer the questions that plague our future ( How will we end world hunger? Will Brad and Angie ever get back together again? What happened to Tiger Shroff’s face?) children must have empathy. Since I haven’t managed to teach our daughter this quality, I would be grateful if the school did.
They say a child’s first teachers are his/her parents.
This is not true in my case, and I wish to state emphatically that my child is in no way a reflection of me. She has taken after her paternal grandmother, in both looks and temperament. But I believe the holistic, future-ready, IS0 9000 education you will be charging me a kidney for are just what she needs to iron out those kinks in her character. Now, if only it could change that nose her grandmother passed on to her.
(I’m willing to pay extra if it can.)
Menaka Raman
Twitter@menakaraman
The writer’s philosophy is: if there’s no blood, don’t call me