The fad by commercialised schooling establishments has forced their rather complacent government counterparts to come out with matching experiments to search a level playing field for their students. Bureaucrats or ministers at the helm of affairs come out with novel ideas to match up government-run schools or colleges with their better-off private rivals. As a result these days even in remote parts of the country, government schools provide its pupils good uniforms, ties, school bags, and in some states free cycles to set a competitive ambience.
This phenomenon is not a recent one. Decades ago, when government schools in many backward districts were helpless even to enforce a uniform dress code for their students, some school administrators were still doing their best to at least ideologically promote a spirit of competitiveness in select few students who they found to be having some talent. Then their competition was perhaps not so much with the private or convent schools; they mostly struggled to compete with their own ilk in the metropolis and urban area to produce talent to gulp some share of the country’s civil services and medico-engineering positions. Occasionally they succeeded, and produced great talent.
Such students who landed in good positions secured a permanent place in public memory as a hero of the sort of mythic facet; their achievement was recalled as an enormous contribution that lifted the image of the school and district of geographic oblivion.
While the schools took all the credit of such rare achievements, they also isolated those who were less talented or who failed in their endeavours. Teachers had to segregate the dumb from the gifted not only through physical barriers, but also by creating mental chasms between them in order to protect and nurture talent — to ensure that a talent was not spoiled by the wrong company.
Back in the Eighties, having been warned by a strict school inspector perhaps, our small town high school of insignificant reputation suddenly got into action in producing some serious talent. The studious and gifted boys in whom the school saw some hope now needed to be groomed in a spoil-safe environment, which meant the ones who were hopelessly dull must be kept out of their company, lest they contaminated the habitual ennui for studies.
Segregated and herded together in a new section with a common identity of being all dreary-headed, we got a new class teacher who was a potential recruit and trainee himself, who would rather spend all his teaching hours discussing how many of us had ever written a love letter in our lives or if we had ever fallen in love. He would then tell us his very many escapades of the time when he was our age.
We, the roguish boys, liked him since we identified ourselves in some way with him. Our always noisy classroom was soon to be transformed into an ostensibly calm, serene centre of mindful meditation on speculative subjects, such as love and despair in life. Our class teacher earned accolades from the management and headmaster who were astonished to find that their experiment of segregating the ‘dumb’ had worked for our betterment quicker than expected.