Independence in School -- It is the 72nd Year of India’s independence. But we still haven’t been freed from the colonial school system.

The main reason we have not been able to get rid of it is because parents don’t see it as an enemy. I don’t feel free in school at all. I love to learn. Learning makes me happy. But for me learning and school are not synonymous.

School is a little bit of learning but a lot of boredom. I feel I have wasted a lot of time. There is so much I wanted to do. But in the eight hours I’m able to do so little. When I reflect at the end of the day, I have learnt two or three things which could be summed up in very little time but we have a spent whole day on understanding them.

I feel very trapped because I feel that I’m part of a very scheduled system; something many students have gone through but nothing  constructive ever happens.

What kind of freedom am I looking for in school?

Uniforms: 

Uniform is the worst part of school; the shirt is made by the cheapest material you can find, and in one wash it looks as if it's been through 5 years of use. The pants are the cheapest and warmest material in summer (a season in which the temperature goes up to 37 degrees). It feels as if your legs are being cooked.  I don’t like having to wear an I-card around my neck all the time. I’m not an animal that needs identification.

Schools should allow students to give ideas for designs and materials for the school uniform because the uniform of my school has bad material but it still costs a lot. School should take feedback from children on the uniform.

Competition: 

I think school makes us too competitive,  whereas it is supposed to be a safe place for children to learn. The purpose of grading is to measure learning. But the kind of tests and exams that are offered only test memory skills. 

If it were not competitive, we would look at each mistake and learn from it but instead, we dread mistakes. We are actually punished for it and we leave it as it is. It remains unclear and we start studying for the next exam. There are also too many exams and our lives are dictated by these schedules.

I get lousy grades in school. It makes me feel ashamed which adds on to the problem. I don’t feel like studying. 

But I am a self-directed learner. I like biology and watch videos and have learnt about the immune system which is never taught in school. School in fact teaches a very limited amount of stuff, and I would learn more of some subjects.

Why can’t we have some free periods where we decide what we want to learn collectively? We could form a few groups; we would choose our teacher/facilitator (for example our music teacher is also a very good science teacher because he is passionate about it) and then we would learn together in an open environment. Here we could all share our knowledge and resources that we have found and ask questions. We could also invite someone for example a professor from a medical college.

Time to relax:

Frankly, school feels like a manufacturing site.  One teacher finishes her, the other comes in and the whole process repeats itself in what seems like a never ending cycle. We need more time to relax, play games and read. When we have a period when the teacher is absent we feel more relaxed and can concentrate in the next class.

After school tuitions and homework:

I think 75% of my class goes for tuitions because they don’t understand everything in school. I feel this time is stolen from us. School is supposed to teach us, but also ensure that we are comprehending at the same time. If 75% of the students can't absorb it, then either the school is inefficient or the system is trying to stuff more than what a child can understand. Why should we have homework after eight hours of school?

Arts: 

Our school has a lot of facilities but grade 5 to 8 are not allowed because our management believes that we should start studying seriously and treats us like adults. This is probably true for most schools. I feel that they don’t understand that children feel uncomfortable in this situation and don’t like being treated like they're in the army because the big picture here is that children need to be able to explore these too. What if the child is good at music and that could be his career. Even if art is not a child’s career it still is a way of expressing emotions and may be the only thing that makes him/her happy. This could also channel children’s energy into something constructive instead of teachers thinking that they should channel this energy into studies which is not possible. Because, this is a different energy. Arts are the things, for instance, that make me want to go to school. I look forward to martial arts, guitar, painting etc.  

Skills (like choosing a leader, money management, etc): 

These skills are not taught in school and even if the school tries to teach these skills, learning these skills from a text book is not helping and skills are not learned by text books. Rather, they are learned by experience. I feel that democratically choosing a representative by voting in school for things like prefect ship and head girl, head boy should be done by students only, because teachers don’t know how students behave on a daily basis. Students also need their views to be represented in the students council.   

Environment in school: 

Teachers should behave better with students, because after all we are still children and no matter how hard the school tries you cannot make children behave like they're part of the army.  In the army adults sign up for it knowing what that means. But not all children are cut out for that. Discipline is of course important – everybody has to come in to school in time but that can be done through understanding.

Punishments: 

I feel punishments do not help, but add to the problem.  This is what a study conducted by the Centre for Adolescent Health, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute; Melbourne says "Recourse to school suspensions or other exclusionary policies is rarely effective and often counterproductive. The negative impact of school suspensions is more far-reaching than may be anticipated, for both individual students and the entire school community. A common misconception is that school suspensions benefit other students and staff. Students are more likely to be suspended if they are:

• Socially and economically disadvantaged

• In a cultural minority group

• Male.

Within 12 months of being suspended from their schools, students are

• 50% more likely to engage in anti-social behavior

• 70% more likely to engage in violent behavior"

Grading: 

 The grading is meant to measure how much a student has understood. For example if you get 20% in an online quiz, it tells you that maybe you need more help to understand. You don’t proceed further till you get 100% But in a school grading system, it feels like your quality has been sorted based on marks.

Grading system itself is subjective. Take this instance that happened to my friend. Swami, who got  9 in English, 7 in math, 5 in Hindi, 11 in science and in SST 3 out of 25 in school examinations. You may think that Swami is a terrible student but on the contrary he gets 498 in science, 487 in English and 490 in math from 500 in the gifted student program where he gets a scholarship.

So you can do badly in one grading system and do well in another. So grading systems should be evaluated and they should be used to help learn.

Sargam Dey