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Indian School

Summer in the city, the temperature’s 40 degrees, and as always in India the heat is on. The fever brought about by exams is nothing that can be sated by any ordinary medicine. The only thing that works is success and that success is hard-earned. The pressure generated by the exams, and all that they represent for the future, cuts across everyone. Parents are driven, children are burdened, and life is surreal while the fever rages.

The teachers, in fact, are a calming influence and generally enable the students through encouragement and counselling.

Success means the opportunity of even harder work in a prestigious college, and a life full of promise tantalisingly close, like an apparition on the horizon. Fail and there’s the promise of oblivion in a second-class non-competitive education system.

The children, with a healthy dose of pragmatism, accept this is their fate and that for 10 years they’ve been preparing for this life-changing pivotal moment. In the UK there are also similar pressures, but it seems like there are no second chances in India and the attitude of 'better luck next time' doesn’t even enter the thinking.

Four thousand Indian children commit suicide every year due to education pressure. Is this a price that’s worth paying? Or does the fear of economic hardship justify this hyper intense approach, because ’survival of the fittest’ will ensure the survival of the country? What do you think?

Find out more:

• School Standards: time for debate?
• Why is schooling failing in the 'new' India?
• The Changing Face of the Teaching Profession

About the author

Billy Khokhar is an assistant director with the Open University, and an expert on cultural awareness and diversity. Billy used to be a teacher, and is interested in how education in India compares and contrasts with the UK.

Blogging about

Indian School

As always in India, the pressure to succeed doesn’t stem from ‘play up and play the game’, but from a hard edge, sharpened further by economic necessity.

The great Trinidadian writer CLR James said, ‘what do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’. In India, and most of South Asia, to understand the impact of the game at every level of society is to begin to understand the psyche of the country. Cricket contextualises life and that life has many expressions, whether one is privileged or impoverished.

It is more than just a game for many millions. Cricket’s a form of escapism from the drudgery of life for many poor people and, for a lucky few among them, a route out of poverty. For others, it’s an expensive luxury that can be discarded or picked up as easily as one picks up a bat and ball.

for Rohit, cricket is possibly the only way out of poverty

These tensions are beautifully illustrated in 'Howzat!' and you can see the attitude towards the game in the boys’ different approaches. For Rohit, cricket is possibly the only way out of poverty. For Ishwar, it’s part of his life but not the overriding driver, as there’s an education to consider.

Alefiya is probably representative of many girls throughout the world who want to play, but can't or won't due to peer pressures or availability of opportunity. She’s fortunate that her parents are (at the moment) supportive. It’s an excellent opportnity for her to express herself through sport, but also to realise what it takes to be a cricketer in reality rather than the romance of the idea.

No such luxury for Rohit, who has to discard romantic notions of the game and approach it as a route to a better life. Technically the boy is gifted and elegant as a player, and he handles the pressure with grace and humility. What will become of him?

About the author

Billy Khokhar is an assistant director with the Open University, and an expert on cultural awareness and diversity. Billy used to be a teacher, and is interested in how education in India compares and contrasts with the UK.

Blogging about

Indian School

It's a familiar refrain, "These modern ways are diluting our culture and tradition!" You will hear this lament in the East and the West.

India has a rich, vast culture, with a diversity that is amplified by the sheer scale and size of the country. The culture of the South of India is often no more familiar to those living in the North than that of America; in fact, it can even be less so.

What is a common binding factor across the many cultures is the seemingly unstoppable rise of Western values and fashions throughout all of India. I hesitate to say "Western cultural influences" as they are also too varied to describe as one generic entity. It could be those of the MTV generation or the British Royal Family. One person's cultural norm is another person's misunderstanding.

It is enlightening to see the concern about Western culture encroaching on India, when it is so readily welcomed both for its financial possibilities and its entertainment. Could the same thing be happening the other way round, with Indian culture feeding back into the West?

Is the concern of the schools to ensure that somehow Indian culture and traditions are not diluted and compromised by Western ideals, undermined by the use of English for teaching and conversation?

Further, is there not an extent to which getting to grips with the language involves an understanding of the culture? Perhaps, while English is the main medium in schools then there will always be an element of dilution. After all, the parents all speak English at home too.

The inference could be drawn that 'modernity' must always compromise culture and tradition. But I wonder if this is true? Perhaps modernity actually allows the students (and the wider society) to become more acutely aware of their own heritage and influences – working as an accelerator which allows and encourages tradition and culture to be celebrated.

The questions, however, are not as new as the cultural pressures they concern. These ideological battles have always run through Indian society, and perhaps always will.

About the author

Billy Khokhar is an assistant director with the Open University, and an expert on cultural awareness and diversity. Billy used to be a teacher, and is interested in how education in India compares and contrasts with the UK.

Blogging about

Indian School

Caste is a touchy topic in India, not least because it is a concept so very hard to explain, so hard for on outsider to grasp the nuances of, and yet it is so much a part of the westerner’s stereotype of India.

I want to emphasise that discrimination based on caste has been against the law in India for almost 60 years. Anti-racism laws in the West are of more recent date.

That does not take away from the horrors of castist behaviours and violence based on caste in modern India. There is scarcely a day when you do not find some reference to caste injustice either on the front page or buried somewhere in the fine print of the daily paper.

The magnitude of the issue only came home to me when I was part of a Women’s Journey team to study women and caste violence in 2002. Before that I had glossed over the issue like many others with my social advantages do. Many Indians who have not encountered caste discrimination, let alone suffered from it, are shockingly oblivious to it.

Whatever the constitution of India says, we are not an egalitarian society. Hierarchies are deeply embedded in our psyche. Most of us are comfortable with authority, either wielding it or being subject to it. Obedience, respect and conformity are deeply held values.

Caste has no place in the modern world which is based on completely different values. Yet snobbery based on class and underlying caste identity persists.

About the author

Madhavi Kapur is the head of the Rewchand Bhojwani Academy, one of the schools featured in Indian School. She has been a principal for 21 years and has worked as consultant to school projects across India.

Blogging about

Indian School

What pressure! As if the academic burdens were not enough to cope with, the pupils at these two schools have caste pressures to live with too. They have to endure comments and judgement, from their peers as well as society.

The contentious 'quota' system of reservations is flawed. Students from lower castes are allocated places as part of a quota, but academic requirements are compromised and therefore there’s no parity. The higher caste pupils are then pushed to achieve improbable entry marks, to compensate for the lack of places available to them through the reservations system. This causes resentment and puts the heads and schools in a difficult position.

pro rata they’re actually overachieving

To counter this, you could argue that the pupils from lower castes have started from a lower baseline, both socially and economically, so they’re academically compromised and have to play 'catch up' all their academic lives. So pro rata they’re actually overachieving.

In the UK when pupils often win places to private schools and gain scholarships there’s usually a standard academic test that they’ve passed. No compromise is made for class, or social or financial standing. You could argue that disadvantaged pupils in the UK are still relatively enabled, compared to their Indian counterparts who’ve a far greater amount of catching up to do.

Wherever the reality lies, does the caste system resonate as a distorted mirror of the class system in the UK? It’d be interesting to find out.

See also:

• Can there ever be a classless society?
• Why is schooling failing in the 'new' India?

About the author

Billy Khokhar is an assistant director with the Open University, and an expert on cultural awareness and diversity. Billy used to be a teacher, and is interested in how education in India compares and contrasts with the UK.