School, or A Witch’s Den?

 

‘tis the Season Of Learning. In other words, School’s In after the summer break. In many geographies, the new school year starts in September. In some, it starts in April in a desultory manner, especially in those latitudes where summer is not so much bright sunshine as the very real risk of sunburn / dehydration, but the full circus starts in September. In a few countries, school starts in June. I come from one such country.

I have never much liked rain. “Wet outside” is not my ideal state of being. This dislike (“hate” is too strong a word) was compounded by having to go to school in what meteorologists describe as “convective cloud formation associated with rainfall and fresh winds with a speed of 40 km/hr over some areas”. In short, the combination of intemperate weather and the need to gain what education one could gain produced one very damp and sodden student. Which darkened my views on that most noble of institutions – the school recess. (Read more on my thoughts on rain here).

I went to a school which took “mass education” very literally. There were over 3,000 students at any given time in the complex, absorbing knowledge in 3 languages. Each grade (1st to 10th) had over 10 “divisions” labelled alphabetically (A, B, C…), and each division had at least 60 students. Do the maths. Assemblies in my school resembled one of those parades on Red Square. This also meant that one could go into any division and not be turfed out for being in the wrong room, because the teacher had no means of knowing who was supposed to be where.

What about Roll Call, you ask? A non-utilitarian concept meant for effete schools with under 20 students per “division”. Usually found in the South of one’s hometown.

I was a rather shy and reserved lad in the pre-teen and teen years. The onset of visual aids at an early age, the need to wear shorts as part of the uniform even after the voice had broken, and a stammer, all combined to make me crave that “Solitude, where we are least alone” (per George, Lord Byron). The situation was compounded by the fact that the school was a “mixed” school, i.e., it provided gainful education to boys and girls. Simultaneously. In the same room! Imagine the plight of a wee lad, unaccustomed to the company of strange ladies, forced to engage in education with skirted beings assembled to starboard and giggling under their frilly lace handkerchiefs.

The divisions were built around an invisible caste system, wherein the bright students were in the first three divisions, and the rest were arithmetically divided into the balance divisions. That was rather mean on average students like myself, with no access to brighter minds and kindly teachers who went over and above the call of duty to drill knowledge into brains whose neurons fired so frantically that they almost made the students keel over.

I struggled to understand most of the education that was fired like cannon shells at myself, and this led to my being enrolled in a phenomenon called “private tuition”, which merits a full post by itself. Mathematics and Science were beyond the pitiful limits of a brain more attuned to words and a fantasy world where there was no need to explain why A squared + B squared equalled C squared. I mean, why?? And what was I going to do with the knowledge that inert gases were not what I thought they were?

But the years passed by, through rain and shine. In 9th grade I managed to slip into the C division because I took French as a 3rd language (bless the French, I always say). One’s ego and sense of self-worth inflated like a balloon filled with the best helium money could buy. By the way, for the non-Indians reading this, most Indians are at least trilingual by the time they leave school. Many are pentalingual. Which adds a lot of depth and flavour to our arguments. And which speaks volumes about the quality of education in our schools.

In spite of the trials and tribulations I went through, I did manage to rise through the ranks and clear each grade with reasonably decent results, all thanks to the tenacity and determination of the schoolteachers to hammer in reams of education into receptive or unreceptive cerebrums (somethings do stick from Biology…).

And finally, one glorious April day, in spite of being in classrooms full of the slings and arrows of outrageous education (sorry Bill), I managed to scrape through the 10th grade and pass out (feet first) with an honourable discharge. And went on to a rite of passage called College.

So, in short, school was what Bill meant when he said, “Hell Is Empty And All The Devils Are Here”. But it had its compensations. Like the relief one felt on leaving it, and the knowledge that come what may, I did not have to go back to school.

Little did I know that I was entering a school called Life! Where "We are all just prisoners here of our own device". Guess Don also went to a kind of Dotheboys Hall.