A shrunken world of schools will impact India’s future leadership

The exposure afforded even by elite schooling in India must widen to inspire optimism on outcomes

is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.

From the windows of our classroom, we could see trains passing. The railway line was more than a kilometre away, but down on a slope, with nothing to obstruct our view. Spotting the Tamil Nadu Express (it was the fastest on the route) was the high point, and its distinctive red colour a giveaway. We could also make out the Grand Trunk Express. Even in 1978, that was one of the busiest train routes, connecting the north with the south. There were too many passenger and goods trains to be identified, but we would try to count the number of wagons and coaches.

Our imaginations would fly with the trains. To Madras, as it was known then, to Delhi, Agra, Hyderabad and Bombay. And places like Wardha, Itarsi, Warangal, and many more. In 1978, those places were accessible to most of us only in our imaginations. The window of our classroom inadvertently became a kaleidoscope of the world.

There was no other building within a kilometre’s radius. Most of that open expanse was huge igneous rock with nooks and crannies, as also small and big crater-like formations that became tiny ponds after the monsoon rains. We called them chhattaan (boulders), and chhattaan kudna (jumping across those boulders) was a game of utmost courage and athletic prowess.

There were clear champions. In my memory, Rahul, Juby, Ish Kumar,

Deepak and a few others left us in awe, as they fearlessly leapt across what seemed like impossible gulfs between two boulders, risking falling 6-10 feet on to the hard rock below. I can recollect closing my eyes in fear as one of them would sprint to jump. Rarely did they fall and rarer was a serious injury. After the monsoons, catching fish or tadpoles was the favourite pastime. As we grew older, we used the excuse of collecting these creatures for our biology lab.

Even in the blazing sun of April, we would often walk back home; over those smouldering boulders up the Arera hill and then down. Other kids would go their own way. Some to sprawling bungalows, and some to congested quarters. Differences that we were unconscious of in school.

You can’t see passing trains from those windows anymore. The boulders have vanished and buildings are all you see. There are no tadpoles after the monsoon. Since I drive around there once every few months, I know it won’t be easy to walk back home from there.

So, what if a child’s imagination cannot get pulled along with a Tamil Nadu Express from the window? Is that good or bad? Is that even a relevant question?

When I was in that school, it was just called Kendriya Vidyalaya Bhopal. Today, it is called Kendriya Vidyalaya Number 1, Bhopal, because now there are five Kendriya Vidyalayas in the city. It’s good that there are so many more of them. Today, much like back then, these schools are sort of the ‘elite’ public schools, as they are well resourced. All our public schools should be like them, but till we get there, the more of these schools we have, the better it is.

We moved to Delhi in 1977. I joined Kendriya Vidyalaya, R.K. Puram Sector Eight, which stands today much the way it was. In its vicinity, a few private schools have sprung up. Each of these seems to serve a certain category of the population. So, kids come from different kinds of homes and go to different schools designed for those homes.

The Kendriya Vidyalayas I studied in were definitely some of the better resourced schools, even in big cities. Even today, these schools are better resourced than most in the country, and there are many more private schools even better resourced than them.

But while the number of such elite schools and their resources have expanded, too many of these schools have shrunk. The physical world of the schools, which integrated them with nature and the city, has shrunk. Windows don’t open to the diverse world anymore, students can’t collect tadpoles, nor do they walk home. The social world of these schools has shrunk even more, with more students coming from more similar backgrounds. Even the Kendriya Vidyalayas have shrunk in both ways. The kids of officers of elite government services rarely go to Kendriya Vidyalayas, they go to even-moreelite private schools.

What effects do such a shrinking have on us as a people? Definitive answers would be foolhardy. But we can conjecture the slow burn shaping the populace going to such schools, leading to a shrinking of fraternity and capacity for empathy, and thus to the exclusion of different people and even nature. Not ‘intellectually,’ but in their innermost beings, bereft of the experience of real people in the real world. So, perhaps even the shrinking of a sense of our shared destiny as humanity.

Most of the 260 million children of our country do not go to these elite schools. The schools that they go to need urgent improvement and transformation on most fronts. Rightly so, our policies and actions are focused on that.

However, this kind of shrinking of our elite schools is bound to affect our country. Given the way that societal dynamics operate, a disproportionate number of our leaders in all walks of life will continue to come from these schools. Whither our country if the minds and hearts of our leaders have shrunk?