The Weight Of Knowledge

Whether or not Kapil Sibal’s reformist brainwave dispensing with the trauma of examinations every other month, and making the tenth mile steeple chase optional, so that schooling becomes an experience that would invite the teenagers to take a pleasant walk down memory lane, is a point that should be decided by experienced and humanistic educationists. I had this beautiful vista during my School days that did not require me to do any homework and the evenings were for play, not a continuation of the school drudgery to torment my mother, whose only contribution to my education was her teaching me to count 1,2,3. etc. and I thought about the examinations as a necessary evil to be endured until deliverance from the education factory. If the voting age is brought down from 18 to 12, I am sure Kapil would be immovable from his big ministerial chair…

However, Kapil wasn’t told by his lower tieral officers that the notebook industry in India is the largest in the world of which the consumers are the school children who lug on an average, 20 Kilos of notebooks in their backpacks, to schools rain or shine 6 days a week except Second Saturdays (of the month). Since lateral expansion would entail financial suicide, the school buildings go vertical making the tiny tots heavy duty porters of their own books. This is in addition to the water bottles and lunch packets so lovingly included by parents as the day’s victual armoury. To this daily fare the teachers, with malice towards none and love for the children, add pleasant architectural training by ordering them to do a project in miniature of, say, the Trombay Atomic Power station. or the Omandurar Secretariat model or some such small projects. which any child of 10 can do in a jiffy for less than 5000 rupees. Educational props are so cheap these days!

“One good thing about this ‘Heavy’ education is that, it prepares the young things for a rough life in case they don’t get into Medical, Engineering or other technical colleges. They can, if their spine hasn’t already been wrecked by the ten-year weight lifting training in schools, enrich weighty professions like loading goods, or transporting heavy house-hold goods as specialists in packing and moving. Besides, these muscle-hardened chaps have only to get a basic touch of Karate to protect themselves and their family from this hooligan filled country… Think positively, friend.”

“You are right. I wonder why Kapil did not pioneer the criminalisation of corporal punishment in schools, a rampant pastime all over India. If being kind to the tiny tots, some of them don’t beat them, they only make them kneel on the floor for two hours and compel them to copy the trash written by them on the board. May be it is good for the knees that has to carry one for years, but a young relative told me that he would rather have new knees at Miot hospital than undergo this torture by the teacher… That should be Kapil’s next agenda or Miot will have to build a new block soon.”