Beloved School
There once was a school. Children loved it. They made happy memories there. They played and learnt and loved. Friendships for life were forged. Most teachers were beloved. They encouraged. They were firm but fair. They taught not only their subject (which they actually knew) but also by example. Children’s self-worth was built step by step. They were never pampered or had their egos massaged but neither were their hopes and dreams pulled down. Bright students were praised but all were given a spot to shine. If not in academics, then in sports or theatre or art. Children were considered fallible, impressionable human beings and so were the teachers. No one individual was expected to be a perfect clone marching away from a machine. Yet each child knew that he had a place there, faults, talents and all. Children knew that they were loved. They mattered. Parents sent off their children in the morning and knew that life and lessons would be taught and learnt. At the end of the school years, children felt genuine regret at leaving, and not relief that this experience was behind them.
Today’s school is such a beast. It is a machine, a soul breaking and heart wrenching place. Parents see their children disheartened, disillusioned, and disappointed every day. A school that tears down every small achievement and disparages all effort. A school where poorly qualified teachers are protected by a wall of silence. A school where 12 and 13 year olds have the weight of the world on their hunched shoulders. Remember the school in Pink Floyd’s The Wall? It is not a myth. It survives and thrives, it has only learnt to hide behind a glossy veneer and the misleading language of high tech education.
Let me tell you more about this beast of a school. In the last year alone, at least three children have been so badly bullied, either by their peers or by the administration, that they have left school in the crucial high school years and are being home schooled or have found more empathetic alternatives. A teacher friend says the school does all it can and simply cannot afford to get involved further due to legal ramifications. The teachers of this school are gradually painted with the same hard calloused arrogance after a few years in its employ. It is a trait that trickles down from the very top. There is no record of how many children have mysteriously left school over the years and why. I can only imagine it was possibly because of the lack of support from the school to troubled kids, not just because they were drug addicts or pregnant, as is the common perception of this school amongst outsiders.
My son, a reticent individual, in his final year at this same school, gives me a heart-breaking and surprisingly emotional perspective when I ask him if his group of friends see and respond to the bullying of their juniors by their own classmates. He says, ‘Mom, it’s best for us not to get involved. It gets worse for the victim if we stand up for them. The bullying intensifies. And we can’t be there all the time to keep watch. The teachers hardly ever really do anything concrete about the bullying. They just call in the bully and give him a talking to. The kids laugh at the teachers when they do this. It’s especially bad in middle school years but everyone has to learn to deal with it. It gets better the older we get.’
A child killed herself a few months ago. She was a student in our school until last year. The circumstances of her death may not have been related to school but I have a horrible feeling our school is only too relieved that it did not happen on their watch, never mind that the child spent her growing years in this environment. This school encourages children to leave rather than help them deal with their problems. They’d rather concentrate their energy on the toppers and all-rounders and headliners. The celebrity children, too, are allowed their fair share of a place in the sun.
A school where so much emphasis is laid on high achievement and house spirit and participation to bring laurels to the institution is a toxic educational environment. A school where the average student or underachiever or loner is disparaged, sometimes subtly, often openly, is a business at best. It is not the nurturing, loving place I imagined for my children.
I remember an interview with the Principal when my older son had finished Std. 10 and was leaving for another school to complete his final two years. I went to thank her for the years he had spent happily in school though in truth he was miserable and his self-esteem had reached rock bottom in the last three years of school. She brought up his marks in the recently concluded board exams. He had scored only 79%, the lowest in his batch, she smirked as she pointed out this unnecessary fact to me. I looked at this role model for the thousand odd children entrusted to her care and wondered if a more unworthy educationist existed. Nevertheless, I was brought up to respect teachers. Also, a sense of self-preservation is something we parents learn early on in this school. My younger son still had his mountains to climb in the same school. So I thanked her again and left with tears in my eyes at her callous cynicism.
A prefect, a brilliant boy with a promising future, left mysteriously half way through Std. 12 a few years ago. The rumour was that he made private comments disparaging the head of the institution and was asked to leave without a character certificate. If an eighteen-year-old criticises or rebels, certainly he may expect repercussions. But as adults and educationists, shouldn’t we stop ourselves from exacting vindictive retribution on an adolescent in a degree far outweighing the perceived crime? Eighteen year olds are notoriously short sighted but to respond so brutally to a prank is to lose to that eighteen-year-old mind. No one dared confront the lady in question and point out this subtlety to her.
Children with learning issues have been especially hounded and harassed in the most creative ways. Refusal to allow them to drop a subject is the preferred method to coerce them into leaving school. These children struggle to cope with ten subjects, when they are well within their rights to drop Maths or Science or a language. Instead, the pressure to perform to the school’s unnecessarily high standards is relentless and the child end up an emotional mess even if he does make it through the final year. Parents struggle to make sense of this despotic environment. Most are too frightened of the backlash to complain. The pat response of the school to any complaint is an invitation to take the child out of school. To be fair, parents too are overawed by the school’s reputation and the society label that being a school parent supposedly gives them. Children resist the hard option of moving to another school, making new friends and adjusting to a new life at this particularly vulnerable stage of their lives.
Mothers cry secretly to each other. Some of us bite the bullet and move the children out, to find, in most cases, that they blossom and shine in other schools. Parents who had been told in front of their child that he/she is hopeless, lazy, unmotivated, useless find to their thankful joy that it is not their child who is the problem, it is the school. In the new schools, these same children become school captains and leaders. Some are admitted to engineering schools and art academies because their new schools give them the support and skills they need to excel. Others stand up straighter, shoulders back, the weight and burden of unrelenting pressure rolling off their shoulders at long last. Their self-esteem is restored, their morale boosted.
After ten years of hearing negative feedback about my child and everything he managed to do wrong, I cried at his first open day at his new school when I was told what a fine young man he was, how hard he was working and the 100% support the teachers planned to give him. I bless them and the school every day for giving my son back to me. I could so easily have lost him, like other parents have lost their children to pressure and stress and unreasonable expectations in the old school.
This school has been failing its children for many years now. Mea culpa. I kept my children in in this school out of misplaced loyalty (four generations of the family attended, after all) when I should have read the warning signs better with my older son and taken him out before the damage to his self-confidence was done. Sure, most of their graduates go to world class colleges and are highly successful alumni. I wish the hidden underbelly of the school was visible to more alumni though. Perhaps then their suppressed horror stories would come tumbling out. Perhaps we would hear from all those invisible kids who left half way through the term and no one knew why. I write this today because a young girl has pulled herself back from the brink and returned to school after horrific bullying by her classmates. She is a brave girl. I hope this school does not defeat her as it has defeated so many other kids who needed support and help from their beloved school and only received ridicule and rejection instead.