How soon is too soon

(This being India)

The front page of the newspapers today informed me that the draft of the Right to Education Bill has been finalized by the Central Government in India. And the best part about it, our children will start school later. Hallelujah, someone out there has been listening to us, griping and grumbling about how infants were being dragged into the schooling system by unscrupulous elements, at an age when they were still finding the language to inform us that they needed to go to the potty, and more often than not, needed diapering of their yet untrained bottoms before they could be let loose in public situations.

My son started playschool at 1 year nine months. I admitted him late. The term had begun in June. He would have been 1.6 had I started him in as the term started. And of course, out here, there is no concept of admitting a child on the basis of his average age, it’s a wide spectrum that starts from the beginning of the year to the end of said year, which gives children born at the start of the year almost a year’s lead time on the poor critters (like the brat) who have the bad taste to be born at the fag end of the year.

The bill, in its finalized draft state, proposes to fix the minimum age for admission to preschool at 3 years 10 months. The bill prepared by the Human resource Development Ministry says the admission age for Class I should be five years and 10 months before the beginning of the academic year. The brat will be 5 years, 6 months when he gets into Class I. Four months under the cut off date. And he, being wondrously slow as a learner. Any surprises that he is having trouble catching up with the rest of his class.

In Mumbai, though, the age for admission to pre school and pre primary has not been fixed by the state government. What with mamma and toddler classes coming into the picture, I think we’re now rushing off from our maternity leave to get our kids into playgroups and schools, while they’re still suckling at the breast. Okay, I exaggerate a bit. But you get my drift.

Most schools in Mumbai typically admit children between two and two and a half years into their pre school. For Pre Primary, that is Jr Kg, the minimum age needs to be 3 years. For Class I, the current cut off is 5 years. At five years, these kids are writing capitals, lower case, two and three letter words, three word sentences, they know their numbers, the counting, seriation, graphs, ordinal numbers, skip counting till 100, ascending order, descending order, greater than and less than, single digit addition and subtraction already when they move from Jr Kg to Sr Kg, and in senior Kg they will learn multiplication and division.

For the record, the brat just about has got a grip on capital letters, and I do his three letter word revision with capitals. He knows his numbers, but the rest of the stuff is beyond him, and I have not forced him to get into it. He will grasp it, as soon his brain is capable of doing so. And if the rest of the kids in class are doing the portion perfectly, more power to them. They also have an eight to ten month lead over him most of the time.

Also to my delight, comes the sentence, “If any school is found subjecting the parents or children to screening for admission a fine of Rs 25,000 will be imposed. A repeat offence will invite a fine of Rs 50,000. If any school is found guilty of taking capitation, the fine will be upto ten times of what it has charged.”

This spells doom for all the so called “refundable deposits” that most school charge during admissions, which start from the modest Rs 25,000 depending on the school, and go upto a few lakhs for the better schools.

And very interestingly, the days of 50 to 60 students packed three to a bench in the average schools also seems to be done for. Hopefully. The draft has also framed a set of norms for private schools on teachers’ qualifications, student teacher ratio and infrastructural mandatories. Schools without playgrounds, dirty premises, teachers with no proper qualifications (just the proper channels through which they applied for jobs, and worse, underpaid and overworked teachers, and therefore disgruntled and disinterested teachers). They seem to hopefully, among the many factors which will be impacted by this bill, if implemented.
Failure to comply with any of these could lead to a closure of the school. Do we see any harassed parents turning cartwheels on the street?

Of course, this will result in unnecessary confusion and running around to plan babies to meet cut off dates, but it makes infinite sense. And it does give one hope, that maybe, just maybe the education system is slowly and steadily getting rationalized in this country. Now if only someone working on that draft could take a look at the absolutely ridiculous syllabus our children have to suffer through. One brave day I will post a month’s syllabus to give you guys an idea of the utter horror that a four and a half year old has to confront.

The day the syllabus at the pre primary level gets rationalized will be the day I truly will celebrate.

What is the age cut off in your part of the world, folks?

Nursery admissions? Get ready for the battle

Kirans' Column

It’s a battlefield out there, and the foot soldiers are two and a half to three year olds, goaded by their parents’ anxiety for them to make the cut. After all, if they manage to make the grade into the ‘hallowed and preferred school’ they can then take it easy till they pass out of their tenth standard and then struggle for admission to their ‘hallowed and preferred college’. The rat race begins early here.

I got my first taste of it, when the brat was born. “Where will you get him admitted to playschool?,” asked a wellmeaning friend. “Ehhhh?” I went, typical of my total lackadaisical attitude to most competitive things in life. Yes, the brat inherits that from me, he’s not about to win any races, much to his father’s disgust. But then I digress. “You have to register in a good playschool right now,” she informed me. “Or their batches will be full up by the time he needs to start.” And when would that be? I wondered aloud. “When he is one and half years. In June. Regardless of his actual age.”

True to form, I didn’t bother. Until various issues (his speech lag, suspected autism spectrum disorder, which thankfully has been ruled out now, and his other developmental delays) had the clinical psychologist evaluating him tell me that I should put him in playschool for him to be able to interact with other children his age. Yes, he didn’t get a chance to interact with children, the building we lived in had no children, and all his cousins were in different cities. We went to the parks and the malls, where he clung to me for dear life and refused to be set on the ground.

Therefore, I trotted off to the best playschools in the vicinity. “Sorry maam. You’re too late. We registered for this batch last year. We had our interviews and everything last November.” I flipped onto the rubber floor in sheer shock. Interviews??? Nonetheless I kept trying at every reputed place, and school in the radius of one kilometer, until I settled on a playschool and nursery run by an elderly Parsi lady, which wasn’t one of the fancier ones, but a simple one with no place for the kids to run around. And benches and chairs where she expected two year olds to sit and sketch and repeat nursery rhymes. And identify fruits and vegetables. It was horrible. My mistake. My only criterion for selecting it being it was two buildings away from home.

Then, the realization that I needed to get the brat into someplace nice, where trained and professional teachers could handle him with the kiddy gloves and care he needed. And the search began again. The parents around me were enrolling their kids in classes that conducted mock interviews to help the child get through the interview process for nursery admissions in reputed schools. My son wasn’t even talking coherently. He had a chance in hell of making it through the interviews.

I applied to five schools. The procedure was standard.
The kids were taken into a room made to play with random toys placed before them, we parents were asked to stand separately, a teacher asked them some questions, they were expected to answer correctly and rapidly.
They were evaluated on how they played with toys, and how fast they put together three to four piece jigsaw puzzles.
We were called in, and interviewed. Our educational qualifications attested by our certificates. Our fluency in English judged. Our current professions scanned and we sitting through an interview with some random pre primary coordinator who must have never gone beyond graduation and teacher training. It was ridiculous.

Finally, one school granted the brat admission. Only because he had gone for the interview running a fever and his disinclination to be a performing monkey gave him the benefit of the doubt. He was two and a half. He didn’t even know the meaning of the word vehicle, how could he be expected to sort out the vehicles from a bunch of random picture cards. All he did was fling them around. Kids of friends were mugging up the alphabet. Learning the names of the President and Prime Minister of India. Learning about the solar system and the planets. Anything could be asked. One child I know was asked “What is Reliance?” The mother, a dear friend tells me, “I stood up and took my child and walked out.”

Learning the recitation of nursery rhymes. Getting a crash course in training for the ‘nursery interview’, in fact some classes even surreptiously claimed that they had an insider connection for guaranteed admissions. Classes. For training to get through nursery interviews. I was in total and complete shock and disbelief. But then, the school we got admission into had us pay a donation. And when I went to collect the receipts for admission, I saw a child from Mont 1, the class the brat would be in when he would join, being made to stand outside the class as a punishment. The tiny fellow was roaming around unsupervised and no one watching him.
I reached home and cried, and asked the husband to try again at the school I wanted. We had been summarily rejected here already. Needless to say, we had already spent a pretty packet on all the application forms, registrations, etc. I wondered how a salaried person would cope, just filling out forms was so expensive, forget the paying of the fees.

So we tried again. Digging out all the connections we could find. And admission was granted. Thanks be to the Lord. But my blood still boils.

Taking two year olds away from their parents and making them answer inane questions in English which is probably not even their mother tongue is laughable.
And why do all the schools assume that a docile child who sits and does the activities asked of them is an ideal candidate for admission? Are they looking for dispirited zombies.
And worse, and to my mind, the most blasphemous of them all, how dare they judge such little children? How dare they assume they have the right to divide the children and reject some and take in some others based on some arbitary concept of guidelines?

Yes, the law has banned interviews in Delhi, but they continue under the guise of interactions, which are nothing more than interviews under another name. Mumbai parents aren’t so lucky.

Here are some links which I am sure will get your hackles up too.
http://www.theindiancatholic.com/report.asp?nid=9670
http://www.livemint.com/2008/01/25235028/Nursery-admissions-It8217s.html
http://www.expressindia.com/news/fullstory.php?newsid=67429
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1141507
http://www.delhiscoop.com/comments/2008/1/27/5212/99913/0/post

Let me know your experiences. Your opinion. And what you feel about this.

(This post by Kiran of www.karmickids.blogspot.com)