What I have learnt about sending my child to a local English-medium school in India…

4gotoIndia

What I have learnt about sending my child to a local English-medium school in India…

Hi there,
I thought this might be useful for other people considering this. Firstly, let me lay out our situation. This information is based on our experience only – we are an Anglo-Belgium family living in Tiruppur for a year. This is a town with a tiny expatriate population, and no other expatriate families. We both work full-time so home-schooling was not an option – besides – we wanted our son to make friends, socialise etc. Our son has been in full-time childcare since he was little, and done the first year at school in the UK. He was 5 yo when we arrived. We first chose a small school, which we thought would suit him better, but later changed to another bigger school. We spent quite a bit of time in the school ourselves (trying to help him settle) and so got quite an insight into how the schools run.

- Check what class you child should be in. Sounds obvious? We were advised that he should start in 1st Standard – but once he started we discovered that most children were already 6. Seems that some of the confusion was because people ask the age and then say ‘x years completed’… still not sure what this means. Give the date of birth to be sure.

- Children here start to learn to write really young. 1st standard children are all able to do very beautiful joined up writing – a real shock coming from the UK. There is a lot of emphasis on this – and until our son was able to do it he really struggled in the school.

- The whole approach to teaching (in both the schools we tried) is very different from anything we had experienced before. We felt that there wasn’t a lot of learning or teaching, instead children copied a lot. By this I mean copied things off the board, and copied things out of books. There was little or no interaction between children within the classroom setting. Everything is learned by rote. Stories are read out and there is no effort to ensure the child has *understood* the story – instead the ‘answers’ are learnt off by heart. Homework frequently involves writing out the questions and answers five times.

- Creativity is not encouraged in any way. Art lessons included ‘learning to draw a birthday cake’. 32 identical birthday cakes were produced. Ditto – learning to draw a butterfly. There was also an exam on drawing a butterfly… my son commented that maybe he got a low mark because he’d coloured it in in the ‘wrong’ colours.

- There is little ‘play-time’. In both the schools we have been to there was no ‘play-time’ of any sort. Lunch and snacks were taken sitting at the desk in rows. There are (on paper at least) lots of extra-curriculum activities listed – but these are the first to get cancelled if anything else arises.

- There is a huge emphasis on exams. There are quarterly exams, half-yearly exams etc etc. And in the weeks running up to exams there is exam-practice.

- Despite what we were told, hitting children (with ruler, book, hand, or whatever) is common. I was told more than once that ‘none of our teachers ever beat the children’… but I saw it plenty of times with my own eyes. I guess is depends on how you define beating. Lets just say that my definition was different from most of the teachers at these schools.

I don’t mean to put anyone off if you are considering sending your children to a local school. But if we’d been a little better prepared it might have been easier (or maybe not!) Having said all this, our son has adjusted and is reasonably happy at school. It took a long time, and he will never love it (as he did school in the UK) – but he tolerates it!

Hope this helps.
Mrs4

indiaprof

Really interesting - and not surprising. A very good post. Thanks for sharing this.

capt_mahajan

Spot on.

With a wife who has taught for many years in mainly local but an international school too (and who left one school because she could not get them to stop beating the boys), and with two kids who have gone through local schools in Hyderabad, (and with my own schooling in Delhi, Calcutta and Bombay) my only additional comment is that most Indian local schools encourage what I call the 'mug it and puke it out at the exams' (hereinafter called the 'mug and puke' ) method of education.

I wish more would insist on 'how to learn' rather than 'what to learn'. I had to often tell our kids school was not important, even when they were doing very well. My wife is more subtle.

(PS:Consider the Mark Twain quote on schooling resaid )

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Outside the machine

edwardseco

Factory schooling..

nayan

capt_mahajan

-crossposted with nayan-

Yep

Adding a bit..

-Not all local schools hit students. In one of the schools my wife taught in, touching a child in anger was a sacking offence. This was a girl's school; not surprisingly, the boys school run by the same people had a few teachers hitting the boys. (There is the thought that boys can't be disciplined otherwise). My wife did not appreciate my humour when I said that I would land up and hit the teachers.

-I teach navigation periodically to school graduates. Out of the last bunch of 15, perhaps 3 understood the basics of spherical trignometry, after having done it in Class 12, less than a year ago. Sometimes the theory is part of the syllabus but the concept is not

gw5458

>>> Children here start to learn to write really young. 1st standard children are all able to do very beautiful joined up writing – a real shock coming from the UK. There is a lot of emphasis on this – and until our son was able to do it he really struggled in the school.<<<

Sounds all too familiar. I lived for a few months in Maharashtra some years ago and visited a couple of English-medium schools. In one I was shown the end of year exam paper for six-year olds: it included maths and reading/writing tests in English, Marathi and Hindi. All of them at the sort of level of difficulty British children would not be set until the age of 11 or 12. At another very popular English-medium school a teacher told me about the competitive interviews for places in the nursery classes where children of three years old and their parents were (fairly gently!) grilled in both English and Marathi before being considered for a place.

obione980

Rote learning and passing examinations (which require little problem solving or interpretation, but mainly regurgitation of facts) are the core of Indian Education. Why?? Because of the enormous number of students and the resources required to - grade, scale, mark etc - students - leaving examinations, which are probably realistically, the only method of differentiating performance across the country.

It's a HUGE problem - and I certainly have no idea on how it might be dealt with in a country of such size and diversity!!

edwardseco

Yes. a neighbor's son was not admitted because the mother failed the test. Very emarrassing and stupid..

sweetmango

Although it is tempting to compare schooling in India with schooling in the UK, they are both really very, very different systems with very different goals. At the other end of the spectrum I teach kids in London, and a lot of these kids have absolutely no idea what respect means and certainly do not have any "life" skills (including literacy and numeracy) even at the age of 17. Somewhere along the line, the "fun", the play and the understanding did not work.

I could say a lot, lot more, but let's see what the reaction to this is..........

pontesnm

Our classes had 42-57 students (mostly over 50) with no teachers aide. On the other hand, students learn to provide respect and develop a great deal of mental discipline and perseverance. Indian schools would typically be likened to military boot camps (which also do not teach creativity )

ChrisHayes

Our daughter goes to the Calcutta International School which attempts to do the UK curriculem with an Indian ethos. So its the same thing I'm used to, but with the far supierior Indian peer group attitude to education being a good thing. So I hope my daughter is getting the best of both worlds!

capt_mahajan

Not that I know anything about school education in the UK, but Asian vs European/US schooling strikes me as the story of two extremes.

Surely there is a middle path somewhere?

spark1e

Ah. Happy medium.

As somebody who was educated primarily in the US, I am grateful for doing 1st standard in India. I definitely learned about work, discipline, and how much material one can learn if determined. That said, one year of Indian schooling was plenty.

missRenu

very interesting post. i wanted to open up the debate to include older students and the effect this has possibly had on their general psyche. i was schooled in the u.k...or rather not schooled haha! ( im not shy about saying that im a rubbish student , i m a cretaive person) and my cousins many of whom were schooled in delhi , well lets just say they really know what hard work is, in a way i dont think i will ever get! They do focus and concentration here very well in a way that compared english students would not.
I have read in the paper quite often of kids in their late teens early 20s, one i read i think as young as 12 being driven to suicide due to some trauma with educatiion. I dont know much about parenting as i dont have any kids - but is their anything parents can do to help relieve the stress the kids are under. This thread of course is a perfect example of trying to ' help the kids out'.