By Naba Bhattacharjee
A friend’s request yesterday for school admission form, brought back memories of a cousin sister in tears last year; distraught after her son, failed to get KG admission in a school of her choice. “What a farcical interview – the child is taken to a separate room where two or three adults were watching as various questions and tasks are placed before him”. “It is case of a four year old pitted against three elders”. “Not fair”, she added, hysterical. “I prepared him through interaction with few children who had successfully gone through the process”. She and her husband had even memorized their probable answers using cue cards for the parents’ interview! “Most horrible week of my life; had trouble sleeping at night and too many hours filled with ‘whys’; why did this happen to me”? I did not dare to offer counsel, as she took the failure personally and in the process posing a threat to the kid’s confidence in him. Yet, I could not help but wish she could do what parents of my generation did; pack us off to any local kindergarten or school, as long as it is not in someone’s garage, verandah or store and sparing some quality time occasionally, to review our progress. It’s a mean competition among parents to-day, with its own rules and intrigue, which can turn sensible, child-loving parents and educators into hard, calculating, and paranoid operators. Earlier, the biggest headache for the parents was how to convince their `crying` tiny totters to go to school in which they had just been enrolled. But today, it’s the parents who cry.
The word ‘admission’ appears dreadful. In Shillong there seems to be no dearth of schools but limited number of seats and unlimited number of candidates has made entry into a school of one’s choice all the more difficult. Parents usually try their best to trace out some way or the other to avoid this uncertainty, through discreet donations by the affluent or through ‘contacts’ ‘with influential persons. It is testing time for parents, more than the kids, taking out extra time to hone their communication skills, make themselves look presentable and preparing themselves for the dos and don’ts of ” parent interview”. Most parents become restless and stressed when it comes to choosing and sending their kids to school for the first time and the need to adapt to new timings etc. That admission to nursery or KG should become such cut-throat business is doubtless a joke to those not in it – “yet” or with children already past that age. However, the pint-size contestants of this game are merely the most striking example of a profound change in sentiments about early childhood and what it means to be successful in the Darwinian struggle for exclusiveness, while parents are cracking under pressure in the process, about their fear of failing their children. It is not far when children shall be planned to take birth in such a way that the February/March deadline can be maintained and the newborn could be considered for kindergarten without waiting for a year to start school and immediately on birth a school admission form is a priority before the nappies and rattles.