BENGALURU: I had heard that the transition from kindergarten to Class 1 is a huge leap for a child. They would have a time-table, different subjects and tests. But according to me, the biggest leap was that she would be moving from a four-hour to a seven-hour working day, and would have to get used to having lunch in a 25-minute break.
What I was not prepared for was that the weight of her school bag would increase from 1 kg in kindergarten to 5 kg in Class 1. My confusion over why this ferrying of all text books and notebooks to and from school was happening was cleared in a morally debilitating parents-principal meeting. The principal said that till the previous year, the bags were light because of a teaching method that encouraged activity-based learning. So, books were sent home only if there was homework. However, parents of the previous year’s batch had voted out that method because it was not doing a ‘good job’. The school promptly booted it out and reverted to the regular method of teaching. In the principal’s own words, the earlier method would encourage the students to ‘think’, and the current method gave no such option.
This is when I exposed my deficiencies as a parent. I asked the principal what the need was to insist on sending all six text books (each nearly 100 pages) home every day. She looked aghast. “Don’t you want to know what the child has learnt in school every day?” I said I didn’t think it was wise to expect working parents to revise every single thing that is taught every day. Instead, would it not be better to send two every day, and revise thoroughly? At that moment, I lost the support of the majority of the parents too. My more sensible friends who had gone through this rigmarole earlier had warned me against taking a stand opposite to ‘normal’. Normal meant that the parent would work from 9 am to 5 pm and still find time to teach their child everything, amidst other chores too. Superhuman parent, and now, I was not one.
My idea of kindergarten and primary school was fun and learning. I get validation from the draft National Education Policy 2019, which says, “It is important that children of ages 3-8 have access to a flexible, multifaceted, multilevel, play-based, activity-based, and discovery-based education.” And the architects of the policy reached this conclusion because, “The most current research in ECCE (Early Childhood Care and Education) shows that children under the age of 8 do not tend to follow the linear, age-based educational trajectories that are prescribed to them by policy or by any present timelines for curriculum…”
Conversations surrounding problems with school education are restricted to lack of resources, staff and infrastructure. But, even if primary education were to reach all children in the country, there is the issue of the quality of education. We trust that everything that went before is right and what comes later can only be built on top of existing norms. So, if we carried heavy bags, our child should carry heavier bags, if we studied four subjects, they should have six.
Last year, the Ministry of Human Resource Development issued a directive to states whereby, Class 1 and 2 students should not carry bags weighing more than 1.5 kg. And the most is for Class 10 – not more than 5 kg, that’s what my six-year-old carries daily now. As schools and parents are engaged in their own competitions, it would be wise to ask. Do we need nerdy but sad children or smart and happy ones? If I want the latter, that does not make me inefficient or overprotective, just sane. The author is a professional and single parent.