INDIA BLEEDS IN HER SCHOOLS

The institutes of learning where our children spend a large chunk of their day have sadly been stamping memories of fear, anger, disgust and sadness on young minds. A child dies by falling from a second floor corridor of a school, another is raped in the premise of learning, one more we learn has been periodically sexually assaulted by a bus cleaner in the schools toilet and yet another gets killed in a schools washroom.

Our schools are scrambling to match top-class world education systems but have forgotten the distinguishing feature of education namely; the well-being of the students.

Many of our so called good schools are shockingly, breeding grounds of sexual, physical and emotional abuse; these being the dangers that lurk in the seemingly safe environment of some schools. Surprisingly this evil is not limited to hinterlands where lawlessness is commonplace, but is routinely found today even in the metros.

Perhaps we have not got our priorities in the correct order. Parents wanting to give the best to their children look out for International Baccalaureate courses within premises which resemble five-star hotels than a school; which are in fact more of little corporate worlds rather than humble institutes of learning. A large number of private schools have mushroomed today in the name of autonomy, but do parents even feel curious enough to find out about the laying of the Corner Stone of such educational institutes where something has gone horribly wrong? It is obvious that a lot of dubiously accumulated wealth is invested for social respectability in many such schools whose primary motives are far from imparting knowledge. These are stone structures set up by unscrupulous individuals with individual motives of directing their coloured wealth to be hidden under uniforms of respectability.

Education today has become a business. Schools are advertised on hoardings and on buses. It’s all a world of show!  It’s all about a service industry serving the most important citizens of a country – its children; but serving them in a care a damn and a sub-standard manner.

There has to be something dreadfully incorrect with a society that puts the emotional and physical safety of its children the lowest in its priority list. Such behaviour is nothing less than criminal neglect.

The problem here is certainly not a superficial one; it has its roots deep in the principles of a nation as a whole; a nation which celebrates its teachers irrespective of their quality. How many teachers today care to know their students and are willing to give them a ear before they hurry to their tuition classes? In fact teachers who can be closest to the students are themselves many a times a major cause for their failures.

Sadly this profession of service has remained not truly a value based or a moral one for all. Many schools today are grounds where the caretakers and educators are often found responsible for leaving emotional scars on maturing minds.

The clarion call today needs to be for institutions which have a faculty ready with preparedness of voluminous scholarship and a bulk of care for the students. After all it’s the children who are the future of the world; they desire new learning and have hidden anguish for their surroundings. If allowed, they will change the world; however they need ground to work on. The future of our generations is then in our classrooms and the conversations we have therein. 

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