I attended a concert by the flute mastero Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia, this sunday. Now, thats no news. The news is he was in Indore for a launch of a new school & the concert was a part of the launch function of the school at one of the best known hotels of the city.
Yes ! Panditji was roped in, to rope in a crowd that would then be roped in to admit their wards in the said school.
Getting a guru of the stature of panditji means a use of substantial amount of personal clout (influence) and also money - specially because getting a minimum audience for such a function itself could be dicey (sure enough there were less than 100 odd people in a hall prepared to accomodate more than five times that number).
Money
Education (& I am talking about education of kids) is big business now a days. In Indore alone - not yet a metro city - there are seven schools charging a fee of more than 25000 Rs. a year. (with half of them charging more than 30000). The figures do not in general include transportation - that adds another 6000 a year. In some cases this is even exclusive of lunch/snacks served to children. Most of these schools have sprung up in the last three years.
There are about five prep schools (pre primary) that charge in the range of Rs. 20000+ a year for keepping children involved in educational & developmental activities for three hours a day. They also promise to train (?) these two plus years old kids for admissions to the coveted schools.
Ofcourse these figures sounds like peanuts when compared to some schools based in metros like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore etc. However they are astronomical if one looks at the economy of the city - and living standards of the people. The developments are a function of the increasing metro like population that is resident of this city now.
Infrastructure
One of the reasons for the high fee is the infrastructure that modern day schools are offering. It beats some of the best hotels/clubs in the city. You can easily get seperate cricket, football fields in all schools. Now count - an international standard swimming pool with another for younger kids thrown in, skating ring, well equipped gymnesium, Basket ball, volleyball, badminton &/or tennis courts, open air labs in physics & mathematics, huge and very well equipped mess, full blown auditoriums, outdoor trips almost every month, seminars for parents on parenting & associated issues.
One of the schools offered special lab for kids with learning disabilities, another offers after class support for problem solving, yet another promises no tution needed programme. Kids have never had so good ever.
They are proliferating
The high fee has not prevented people from admitting their children to these schools on the contrary it is difficult to get admission in a few of them - primarily because of two reasons.
One, its a status symbol to get one's children educated in one such school. How else can one prove that they are doing their best for their children. Its a mob effect - one family in a locality gets their ward admitted & then talks about it - others soon follow.
Two, early results seem to be very promising. The kids from these schools apparantly are more confident, develope a wider vocbulary faster, have a greater general knowledge, is more communicative & assertive, developes motor & recognition skills faster and is also, in general, a happier child when compared to similar kids getting educated at the conventional missionary school which is cheaper. This is largely because these schools use interactive fun to learn tools for development of child instead of the conventional classroom classwork - homework routine.
The Challenge
This is not just an interesting trend but also one that needs to be analysed for its impact. The challenge for these schools is to show that despite the variety stuff that provide in educating children they can deliver to serve the traditional model as well. At the end of the day - given the way our system is the child has to do well in exams. As the child eneters high school - the percentages in his marksheet becomes rather important. It is here that most experimentative schools have finally failed to deliver.
There is a challenge for parents too. They need to plan investments rather well if they hope to support the study of their children rather well. A simple comparison says that the amount I paid for my son's prep school in one year was double the amount that I paid to my engineering college - my hostel stay included. Higher education is becoming increasingly expensive and during high school the tution cost of a child is almost equal to, if not more, than the school fee.
The trend is unfortunate and is indication of growing insecurity and uncertainty of parents about the future of their kids. Parents don't want to take a chances with their children's career and try to provide every possible thing to them, often at the cost more than they can afford while working in a city like Indore (I saw people mortgaging their houses for sending their kids to self-financed courses in USA). The insecurity is more in such medium size cities, where there are no job prospects locally and people learn about new things only though media, without any first hand experience. People there want their kids to achieve all that they themselves could not.
ReplyDeleteParents, without any logical thinking, put access pressure on kids to perform well and live in the illusion that skills like being more confident, wider vocabulary, general knowledge, being communicative & assertive, recognition skills etc, would help them in long term. The learning curve in such school is though steep, it saturates very fast. Most of (not all) these kids grow overconfident, arrogant, bullish and loose ability to think seriously. They then contribute to the huge 'skilled' English speaking population of the country which is fit only to work in call centers and likes, but seldom into sincere thinkers and achievers who can contribute to the society intellectually.
Dear Anonymous
ReplyDeleteNice thoughts. However may I suggest that the situation is not as bad as you seem to feel. Yours might be an early judgement.
The education that these children are getting has the potential of turning them into sincerely deep thinkers - will it? - Only time can tell.
The point however is that the education is coming at a steep cost. And our society is passing through a phase where the current parents did not anticipate this hike in educaion cost and hence are not prepared for (in terms of investments) & future parents are only learning to plan for this expense.
Dear aks,
ReplyDeleteIn that case I'll call your's as a late observation of this fact. I made the same observation some 15 years back. Yes, there were such schools 15 years back where parents paid through their nose for educating their kids. Only difference is that then there was only a small class of people patronizing them. Today, driven by media hype or the one generated by society at large, every parent has grown ambitius and has joined the bandwagon giving school managements the field. One needs to remember that knowledge is not expensive but confirming to a particular trend can be. Sophistication anywhere comes at a cost but one should be mature enough to realize at what stage it is really required.
Time has already told us enough, there is enough statistics and host of trails to follow and make a judgment. It's good time parents use their sensibility. How fast a three year old could learns may not be as important as how long in the life he/she is good eneough to learn and discover interesting things. And the latter, as I believe, has mush less to do with the former.
Dear Anonymous
ReplyDeleteThat was really interesting.
Thanks for the insights. Someday do share with me the statistics and the trails that you referred to.
As I know it - the students of schools like DPS are generally accepted as the smarter of the lot. So it will be enlightening to know the pitfalls of the system.
By the way, my post was really not about the impact of this variety of education - but about the cost of it.