Schools must focus on more than skill development

In India today, the emphasis in education is on creating adequate skills to enable the student who has passed out to find employment and earn his livelihood. This is acceptable and skill development is undoubtedly a primary goal of education.

Private education is becoming tremendously expensive and while many elite schools have extensive grounds and impressive buildings, they cannot even be trusted to provide protection to children, who in recent instances, have been molested and/or found murdered. The promoters of many of these ‘international’ schools — often real estate tycoons with access to tracts of land — know that affluent parents who have benefited from the economic boom of the past decade are themselves people with little education, easily persuaded by ostentation that their children are getting the best education.

Here are some of the enticements offered by elite schools to make students ‘fit for the competitive world’ — the phrase calculated to make parents eager to take out their cheque books: 

1. Offer courses and extracurricular activities including creative writing and film-making to children less than 10 years old, which they have no means of teaching. 
2. Give 5-star treatment including choice of breakfasts to boarding school students.
3. Spend huge amounts of money on décor and gardens which makes the school look ‘sophisticated’. 
4. Put up structures to mimic British or American school buildings 
5. Employ foreigners as teachers, paying higher salaries without enough evidence that they can impart education effectively. 
6. Affiliate themselves to foreign institutions.
7. Use the land at their disposal to allow for a wide range of choices in sport including esoteric items like archery, fencing and horse-riding.

Most of these things on offer are trimmings that have little to do with actual ‘education’, it should be apparent.

There are two aspects of pertinence in this scenario and the first is that credulous parents are being misled by the schools and their promoters and enormous psychological pressure also applied on children. Studies have not been made with regard to how well-equipped the students are ‘for later life’ by these schools but a fair number of students may be joining their family businesses, implying that the value of the education imparted to them will never be ascertained. Secondly, there is a sense to be got from the above scenario that the pampering of students by school and parents alike could create problems for society in future. A social goal of education in a democratic country is to inculcate a sense of equality among people and the school ‘uniform’ is actually designed to assist this. But the breeding of privilege has the opposite effect. Teachers need authority to educate, but elite schools, by treating students as their ‘clientele’, undermine this.