A Circle of Disappointment

Looking at the Future World while it's in a Uniform.

There are very few truly universal experiences in this world.  Some do exist, as George Carlin called it, in “The Small World”: stubbing your toe and the like, but none in the realm of our lives that we assign any meaning to.  Even events like weddings and childbirth are behind locked doors, sealed by the authorities of grand social institutions.  However, there is one experience that is recognizable by peoples of the West, the East, and almost everyone in between: going to school.  If you were a middle-class Indian going to a private school, this part of your life was a preparation for adulthood in the fixer-upper world that we live in.

You know what I am talking about if you remember the shrill sound of a whistle being blown directly into your ear by the PE teacher.  Seemingly, this guy - on a daily basis - decided that the best time to blow his whistle was exactly as YOU walked past him.  It was eight in the morning, and you were barely awake, already being pushed and herded by this man with the whistle into the morning assembly.  You stood through the assembly as numbing banalities were bombarded into your head for thirty minutes.  After that, you were herded back into your classroom.  Sometimes, you’d be stopped by the man with the whistle and roughly pulled out of the line for having an unacceptable haircut, or for not having trimmed your nails or polished your shoes, or all three.  That set the tone for what your day, your week, your year and your entire childhood looked and felt like.  Arbitrary constraints placed around you and meaningless tasks stacked on your shoulders, all in the name of “discipline”. This was the all-powerful word that was deemed to excuse all the absurdities of this curious world of schooling.

If that way of putting it seems like a stretch to you, try and remember that there was a particular way we were supposed to clap in the auditorium during an event - a prescribed pattern of beats. What could that possibly have been meant to accomplish? Of course, this wasn’t restricted just to the assembly and the auditorium…it made its way to the classroom too.  Every teacher had her (almost always a woman) own personal constitution that her students were expected to be experts in before having even met her.  The contents of this constitution were not derived by rigorous study of child psychology or a degree in education; they were decided by how hard a time her children had given her in the morning before she got onto her scooter and rushed to work.  Her passion to teach and to shape the minds of new generations almost always stemmed from the need for a few extra bucks to run her household.

Once, when I was in the sixth grade, we had our first Shakespearean Sonnet.  Some of us had heard the name of Shakespeare being uttered by wise old folks and were excited to learn about his work.  It represented a kind of growth and maturity that we were yearning to be associated with.  It meant a departure from having to read childish fables in which animals were personified.  We waited eagerly as the English teacher walked in and opened the book.  “Before we read the poem, can anyone tell me what a sonnet means?” she asked, scanning the classroom with piercing eyes.  We all looked at each other, with blank expressions.  We were under the silly impression that knowing what a Sonnet means is what we had come to school for, we hadn’t realized that it was a prerequisite.  How stupid of us.  The next twenty minutes were spent by our teacher in giving us a disappointed lecture about what a waste of a generation we were and how we had everything easy.  When she realized that she was almost out of time, she dispassionately read out the poem.  “Answer the questions under the poem in your notebooks and show them to me tomorrow. If there are any silly mistakes, I will make you write the poem fifty times!” she said and waltzed out of the classroom.

If you are new to all this, you have probably now forgotten that I am talking about a private school.  You might wonder: while this kind of a charade is to be expected at a public school, how is it acceptable for a paid and often expensive education to be this way?  

When you’ve got kids that you want to raise into successful adults and your only options are schools with walls and schools without them, you are simply not in a great bargaining position.  You take what you are given.  However, it has to be said that the parents don’t much resent the lack of accountability in these schools.  They are not dying to have their views heard or their suggestions considered.  Usually, they are just glad to have someone else they can blame if their kid isn’t raised right.  A perennial conversation you get to hear in an Indian school’s parent-teacher meeting is one in which the mom and dad are telling the teacher how they need to punish their child a lot more, or else he won’t learn his lesson.

All of this sets the stage for a painful culture of anti-intellectualism that is all too common in schools everywhere.  At every corner, those rare children who are burdened with genuine curiosity and wonder are hounded by their peers for being “boring nerds”, and have their souls beaten out of them by the teachers who can’t tolerate an “over smart” student.  While this phenomenon is common across most societies, they are usually restricted to public schools.  What is really unique is parents having to wait in line for days on end, with blankets in their hands in case they have to spend a night at the admissions line, just so they can pay significant portions of their income to have this culture of oppressive anti-intellectualism forced on their children.

Now, although my descriptions paint a dark and depressing picture of Indian schooling, one has to look more closely to appreciate the heartwarming irony that is born of this system.  The environment in these schools births a fascinating subculture that tells us a great deal about human nature; about how there are always people who rise to the occasion and own the problems around them. 

While teachers are circumventing their duty of educating through the pretense of being disappointed old-timers, as I described in the sonnet story, that duty is placed upon some of the students themselves.  

Picture a math class. The teacher has written a set of problems on the board and has now abandoned the class entirely, as she sits in her corner, doing some clerical work with a look of frustration on her face.  There are three students standing at the board and solving the problems written on it.  The classroom seems to have broken into disorder.  But there are small groups of people formed around some of the desks.  At the center of each of these groups is a student explaining the math problems to those standing around them.  They are speaking in a new language strung together with English words but through the grammar rules of their own local languages: a modern-day creole.  

These students are the load-bearing walls of their classrooms; the future citizens that are going to be a cohesive force, keeping their society together.  Their flair is what rises up from the damp remains of an abandoned population; abandoned by the systems that promised to govern them.  In this masquerade of schooling and education, we get to see the roots of Indian civil society itself: A population being held together by the better angels of its nature.

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