Since
it is April timeframe, my wife and I went to this meeting at our daughter's
preschool. The purpose was to give us helpful information about our
kindergarten options.
Let
me just say, as a parent my reaction was: AIEEEEEEEEEEE.
Centuries
ago, when I was a small hairless preschool child in Madras, kindergarten was
simple. When you turned 5, you enrolled in Campus and attended Miss Divya's
kindergarten class, where you made hideous wall painting art from old newspaper
and chalk-pieces. There were no other curriculum options, unless you count the
option of, when Miss Divya was not looking, spitting on the next student or
stuffing the chalk in your nostrils.
I
honestly thought it would be pretty much the same thing for our daughter. I
mean, we live near a secondary school. It has a kindergarten. I figured my
daughter would attend kindergarten there. I was an idiot. (Don’t laugh; you are
no better than me, Hehheee)
It
turns out that this is not about kindergarten at all. This is about LIFE. And
when I say "life, " I of course mean, "IIT, IAM. 1Crore Salary
Package". For achieving this you need to get your child into the right
kindergarten program, so that she can get into the right primary-school
program, without which she cannot get into the right secondary-school school,
without which she can't get into the right high-school program, which means SHE
WILL NOT GET INTO IIT AND/OR IAM AND ALL BECAUSE YOU FLUSHED HER LIFE DOWN THE
TOILET BY PICKING THE WRONG KINDERGARTEN WHEN SHE WAS 5 YEARS OLD. YOU
WORTHLESS UNCARING PARENTS.
I
know what you're thinking. You're thinking: "That's ridiculous! You can't
wait until your child is 5 years old to start thinking about IIT-JEE! You have
to start MUCH sooner Dumbo!"
This
is true. In certain places, by which I mean the whole of Tamil Nadu, serious
parents start obsessing about IIT-JEE before their child is, technically, born.
They spend their evenings shouting the poison distribution equations in the
general direction of the womb so the child will have an edge during the
intensely competitive process of applying for Chennai City's exclusive private
preschools. Yes, PREschools - where tuition can run - and I am not making this
up - well over Rs.1,50,000 a year. If you're wondering how on earth a preschool
can get away with charging that kind of money to teach 26 alphabets, the answer
is three words: really delicious chalk-pieces.
But
seriously, the question is: Why are these parents willing to go to such
extremes, and spend so much money, to get a child into a certain nursery
school? The answer is: They're insane as you.
No,
that's unfair. They're simply people who want their children to have every
possible academic advantage so they can get into IITàIAM route, which admits only
extremely high achievers, which a lot of the time means students whose parents
have driven themselves insane.
Based
on some basic ground study, this is looking at my neighbours as a reference, I
find that the fault completely lies with these education institutions. Why on
earth do they require our kids to know more than our entire ancestors IQ
cumulatively added for entering their campus? Shouldn’t the entry criteria be
changed from admitting only the class topper AND school leader AND star athlete
AND skill full in communication to let us say the ability to hum the theme song
from Kochadaiiyaan movie or perform an imitation of Power Star punch lines.
Wouldn't that be wonderful? Wouldn't that cause these IIT-crazed hyper-parents
to chill out and allow their kids to just be kids?
No,
it would not. It would create a huge demand for humming tutors and they have to
compete in Vijay TV for super hummer junior season MXCVII.
But
getting back to our kindergarten meeting: We went in there naively thinking we
were going to find out how to enrol our daughter in our local kindergarten.
Instead we spent 90 minutes finding out that we had all these options: Did we
want our daughter to be in a magnet program? What kind? International studies?
Math and science? Theatrical arts? How about a Montessori school? Or maybe a
gifted program? And should it be integrated gifted with music? Or drop-out of gifted?
Or sake of attending program? And what
about international medical school?
These
options, and many more, were explained to us by two nice, knowledgeable,
thoughtful people with long experience in the local schools (2 months to be
exact, Source: Again my neighbours). They urged us to visit different schools
and ask many questions before making our kindergarten decision. They stressed
that every child is different and there is no right answer. I think I can say
that I came out of there truly believing that, whatever choice I ended up
making for my daughter, it would somehow be wrong and she would NOT GET INTO IIT.
After
the meeting, we went home and found our daughter was wearing her Barbie the fashion
designer outfit. She is deeply into being a fashion designer. If there were a
gifted Barbie magnet kindergarten program, that would be her first choice. And,
for that matter, mine too. Assuming they have decent flavoured chalk pieces.
