Kids grow up fast. I too had heard the cliché so many times.
But sentences become clichés only because we use them so many times; live them so
many times.
My daughters are in 8th and 11th grade
now. Their world is so different from the one I used to blog about. It is
beautiful in many ways, scary in many others.
Earlier I used to worry about day-care, maids, PTMs, sports
days, birthday parties etc. etc.
Now I worry about the world outside, social media, their
career decisions and higher education. In fact education is the biggest worry
on my mind right now.
We were extremely lucky to find a school which imparts the
kind of education we believed in. The girls grew up exploring, experiencing, and
enjoying (well, most of the time) their education. But now the long tentacles
of the formal education system, the ‘board exams’, the subject-package choices,
and the college entrance systems are closing in.
I find it particularly scary because I remember what the
system almost did to me. It’s almost
been a quarter of a century since then and it is still the same system— the one
which we keep blaming the British for; the one which we haven’t done anything
to change; the one which we ‘dealt with’ in our own ways; the one which now our
children have to live through.
I wish I could do something to cause that change.
Since writing is what I can do, let me start with just that.
I, like many other students, did not get along with the system. I suffered and eventually 'dealt-with' it, but I still remember the pain. I’m trying to re-live and share those experiences here, in the
hope that I can help my girls ‘deal with’ it in a better way. And maybe reach
out to more parents, educators, students who can together create a new system—one
which may not be perfect, but at least a lot better than our current one.
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