Great Expectations : Indian Parents

My heart goes out to all the people in business of educating children, be it school, tuition, or training kids for any sports or activity. Parents have becoming soooooooooooo demanding that it’s impossible to meet their standards. Every parent I come across is complaining about the school, the teacher, the facilities. When did we become such a whining society? Not too long ago or may be long ago parents taught kids to worship teachers.

I met one parent who says I don’t like “X” school because they pressurize the kids to study a lot leaving no time for any of the other activities. The other parent says my kid’s school is all about activities and they don’t pressurize students in relation to academics. One more mother says the school is good and everything is fine except that the classrooms have no air conditioners. About another school they say it’s a nice school but classrooms have about 40 children. To top it all I met a parent who said I am to not happy with my child’s school because my child is always very happy there, they make the environment to happy for the kids and they will not realize realities of life. Life is difficult so the schools should teach even that to the kids. Then when I suggest the name of one very famous school they say it has everything right but it’s expensive.

“OMG! if was a school I would have killed myself.”

So basically parents want a school where the teachers are very very good, extracurricular activities are world class, class rooms and bus air conditioned, not more than 20 kids in a class and all this at a nominal fees. Just that nothing much.

 I agree that everyone has a budget and everyone has a set of expectations. So make a list of your expectations, make another list of schools that meet the expectations and in budget and choose the option. If the list of expectations is unending you will never be satisfied and will constantly complain. When parents talk negatively about the school or teachers in front of kids, kids pick that up and stop respecting them.

I remember being taught

“Guru Govind dono khade, ka ko lage pain;
Balihari guru aapko, govind diyo bataye.”

It means: - if I meet both God and my Teacher at the same time and would be in dilemma as to greet which on first, one would choose teacher first as he is the one who showed the path leading to God.

That is the great place of teacher in our mythology.

Without realizing the harm parents are doing to the kids by complaining about their school or teacher in front of them parents keep doing it. Kids idolize their parents and when they see parents have no respect for school or teacher kids also have no respect for them. Every parent wants the best for their kids and it’s absolutely right, and it’s very good to take an interest in kids’ education. But always looking for the negative side does not help. So make an informed decision when choosing your child’s school and try to understand school’s limitation also.

We may never find Utopia

We are probably the only species that can be accused of hypocrisy. Often our drawing room conversations are about topics that make us sound intellectual, secular, and sometimes even leftist but when we move out of the drawing room to the road of realty we follow the path of me first. We will fight for equality of we are the ones getting the advantage but as soon as we are the ones losing our slogan turns to be each one for himself. We are the species that respects no boundaries. I have heard stories that animals define their areas and sometimes battle for it but once decided they respect the boundaries. But we are the gifted species we have the gift of greed. We want everything for our own consumption.

“The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.”-by Mahatma Gandhi is so true.

The culture where everyone every moment is running the marathon called BEST. I want the best dress, the best school, the best college, the best job, the best holiday, the best blah blah blah, all this nonsense without having any idea about the best. Why can’t we be simply enjoying every moment with what we have.

It’s always good to improve and to compete with one’s own self but to run behind a mirage called success, or BEST is a waste of time, health and energy.

Interesting historical incident comes to my mind. The Government in one country (I don’t want to name the country coz the news channel news could be biased) wanted to bring equality in society by introducing equality in education. So all the neighborhoods had government run schools. Simple assumption would be that as all kids go to government run schools they get to mix with kids of all backgrounds in their school and the playing field will be leveled. But it did not happen so. Eventually people started realizing that some schools had better results. Reason could be any maybe a few teachers were better and schools that had those teachers were lucky. Now everyone wanted their kids to go to those schools where results were better. Eventually the property prices in those areas began to rise because of the demand for houses in the areas. And the society segregated itself into rich and poor neighborhood. Again we had a situation where kids of rich people went to a particular school and got better results creating inequality.

Unless the fundamental frame of human mindset changes inequality is the bitter truth we will have to learn to live with.