School as a site of fear and anxiety

June 30, 2015 12:27 am | Updated 12:27 am IST

When the end of the summer vacation was approaching, Sara’s teacher had asked me to prepare my daughter for her ‘big school’. I knew the morning troubles were set to return after a respite.

But my younger daughter, who had got admission in nursery class, stopped going to school after a week, having undergone a sudden change in attitude to her new school.

After trying many tricks to make her change her mind about the school, I preferred not to send her to school unless and until she made up her mind. Teachers call it the parents’ anxiety, that is transferred to their kids. Her teacher had asked me to mentally prepare her for the school. I thought about it for a while. Sara was never like this in her playschool; she used to go happily there. Thoughts from varied directions started pouring into my mind. Is it the big-school ambience? Or is it the new formal classroom setting? Or is it the teaching approach? Or is it her age? Maybe it is a mix of all these factors putting a strain on her mind.

I know this is not only my story; every parent has to face this harsh reality. Is it really difficult to smoothen this transition for new school-goers? The guards and teachers standing at the school gate encouraging parents to drop their nursery children at the gate appear to be monsters for my daughter, and she really calls them ‘monsters.’ I tried many times to make her understand the facts: “No dear, they are just like your old teachers and friends.” But every effort goes in vain. Here I am trying to understand why the school can’t be a beautiful and an attractive place for children. Most schools rely on the ‘behaviouristic model’ of teaching-learning, that is, training minds to do things in a desired way, and pretend to use play-way methods.

One day Sara’s teacher was complaining to my husband: ‘Sir, your daughter roams around all the time and doesn’t want to sit in her seat. Please make her understand that she needs to sit in the class.”

This reminded me of Tagore, who said ‘the child should be able to appreciate a sense of freedom acquired by free movements of body in the midst of natural environment’. But ironically such sentiments do not find a place in today’s educational system. Perhaps we are made to think in a way that asserts the assumption that such expressions by children pose a hindrance to their learning, rather than utilising their free spirit in the process.

My elder daughter, who is in Class 4, sometimes says, “Mummy! We can go to the field during break time but Sara is so unlucky, she can’t go out of the class the whole day, she just goes to her activity room occasionally.” These words are enough to unravel the reasons behind children’s reluctance to attend school.

One of the excuses made by many schools is: ‘There are so many children in class, how will a teacher be able to pay attention to your child only’. Is it really a valid argument, especially when it concerns children who have just completed three years of their lives and so are even unable to express their feelings properly.

However, sometimes it made me feel guilty of having sent her to a formal school so early. These days, whenever I ask her to get ready for school in the morning, she would say, ‘Mummy, I’ll go to my small school, not to the big school.’ I try hard to convince her to go to the new school, but I would hear her say, “mummy, mera pate dard kar raha hai.”(I’ve a stomach-ache.) It makes me laugh and anxious at the same time, thinking about the school’s failure to facilitate this transition phase for little school-goers. I know after few days or within a month she would stop making such excuses, but does it mean she has started liking her school, or that she has no choice.

I am still waiting for the day Sara would go happily to her ‘big’ school. Else, like others she too would have to be tamed by the poor ‘schooling adaptation process’.

pihunavya@gmail.com

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