Admit It!

Biweekly tuitions, written, homework, mock interviews, and a year of preparation.
Sounds like a year in the life of a potential IIT or medical student.
Sadly, we live in a city where its the life of an average 3-4 year old.
A city in which a dearth of good schools and the desire of every parent to give their child the best has resulted in parents being completely misguided into pressuring themselves and worse, their little babies too.
Each year the race begins for admissions into our city’s most reputed schools. And knowingly or unknowingly, these schools due to their current method of selections, have given birth to what can only be termed as a money making racket.
Playschools have sprung up in every corner willing to take in a child at the tender age of one and a half. An age where he is still battling stranger and separation anxiety and his primary need is to be made to feel secure. Instead parents agree to have them pulled away from his safe haven each morning kicking, screaming and sometimes even vomiting just so he gets an early start in life.

By the age of 3 these playschool ‘seniors’ are then bombarded with a host of extra tuitions specially designed for school interviews that are conducted by housewives with little or no experience in child care and education. And these include group classes, one-on-one tuitions, and mock interviews. Living and non-living, herbivorous and carnivorous, liquids and solids, counting, match the following, spot the differences, sequencing- all become a daily vocabulary of a 4year old. Instead of chasing a butterfly barefoot in a park they are being taught the life cycle of a butterfly indoors.

Is this the kind of life we want for our children? We may console ourselves by saying its only one hour in a day, everybody else is doing it so our child shouldn’t be at a disadvantage, its for their own good, its fun for them. But in our hearts we know that we are wrong. Even a 3year old senses that the disappointed looks he gets when he chooses to colour a rabbit purple or heaven forbid colour out of the lines, or the list of relevant questions that follow each time he plays with his toy animals, are not fun.

Then comes the much talked about interview, with strangers who may ask him to colour an apple but not provide him with the red crayon just to see if he asks for it.

And after all that this journey ends, in most cases, in rejection. Because the parents didn’t know the right people. That is the honest truth. In some prestigious schools if you are not a celebrity or a financial biggie with the right contacts, your child never even stood a chance. All of that work and stress was for nothing. for the number one school today it really boils down to which child is the smartest amongst the parents that were most well connected.

But how do you explain that to the 4year old who wants to know why he is not going to that school again? What have we taught him from all this? Not just herbivorous carnivorous and a bunch of new words that he needn’t have bothered with until he was 6, but along the way he also picked up other concepts such as stress, nervousness, rejection, failure, longing, jealousy, and inadequacy.
All for a school that should be number one because of the knowledge they impart and not because they take in children who already know too much.

In their defense its hard to choose a handful out of the thousands of applications they get, but there has to be a better way to do this, one that spares the children of Mumbai city this trauma. Because nowhere else in the world does this system prevail. In fact school doesn’t even begin for a child until he is 3.

Our system is detrimental to the child’s growth in more ways than one. So this is an appeal of a parent to all reputed educational institutions. Do not feign ignorance about the panic your interview process creates or then definitely do not pretend to care. Do away with words like merit from your brochures. Be honest enough to say that our admissions are by donations, or invitation only. At least the other 3year olds will reclaim a year of their innocent childhood where a snowman could be black and mama would still hug them for it.