Kamal Memorial Public School, D-4 Panki

The torpor associated with school education and the process in which they deliver what they call education has found stinging criticism from different quarters across the globe. To the generation that was born in the 1970s and later, the famous rock anthem of Pink Floyd “another brick in the wall” which has lyrics like “… we don’t need your education. All you teachers leave kids alone” defined school education as it was perceived in the west. In our home land India the Nobel laureate bard Rabindranath Tagore also held views that confirmed that the Indian schooling system is more like a production system that is well oiled, efficient, mechanical and lifeless to suggest the least. Having said that it would be a gross exaggeration to state that the Indian schooling system is substandard. There is no dearth of schools in India that produces champions in all walks of life. Hence an additional drop of water calls for an explanation.
The importance of school education can hardly be over emphasized. Amartya Sen ,Nobel laureate economist and the “ conscience of economics” as he is referred to by pundits of social sciences, and Jean Dreeze his colleague in many research works have time and again spoken of the necessity of transmutation that Indian schools need to got through. Satyajit Ray, Oscar award winning film maker has in his “Gopi-Bagha” trilogy of films has commiserated on the strange compassion for oppression that we Indians tend to nurse in our hearts when we don’t have access to education. So the need to learn, implement and thus alleviate intellectual privation need not be debated.
The question is “what is the anatomy of an ideal school”? Should a school as the essentialists maintain a conservative role and foster the cherished ideals and traditions of the community; or whether it should perform as the pragmatists advocate, only a critical role, criticizing the current trends in the society as well as the plans for social reconstruction put forward by the state, while refraining from presenting any concrete plan of its own or as the Marxists would have it, play a positively revolutionary role ,fomenting the destructive revolutionary forces in the society in order to construct a new social order in place of the old? Given that we live in times that are punctuated often by the India Vs Bharat debate, what should a school build- India or Bharat? Should a school teach its students how to produce computer chips knowing well that an over whelming majority don’t have access to even potato chips? Should a school get caught in the quagmire of such questions or continue to do what it has been doing?
We, at Kamla Memorial Public School believe that to keep mum on these above stated questions is to prevaricate. If teachers themselves indulge in acts of terminological inexactitude how good would be the students –the products of the school? So we say that meritocracy must stay but not by filtering in the “creamy layer” but by including those who are not so meritorious. If children do not have the liberty to commit mistakes then who should? It is not the survival of the fittest but the survival of the weakest that proves the strength of a school. That is where real education thrives.
Hence our science teachers believe that rocket science is important and astronomy at NASA is lucrative but the radiance of a smile brought on a wrinkled old face accustomed to darkness by illuminating a village has more power and holds more promise for the bottom of the pyramid as referred to by Late C.K.Prahalad, professor at Michigan State University. Our mathematics teachers believe that innovation has a certain direction- from the third world to the first world, which has been called “reverse innovation” by C.Vijay Govindrajan, Professor Tuck School of Business. We believe that school education is about walking together with the people and if need be to achieve this end as Tagore had said “ekla cholo” (walk alone). To achieve what we believe, we have in recent years, added new strings to the bow in the form of partnerships with Tata Class Edge, Pearson Longman Digital Class and Opportunity Education, America.
In the final diagnosis, expenditure on all that is material is consumption and expenditure on education is investment. Kamla Memorial Public School considers it a sacrosanct duty to invest its resources so that you can leverage the demographic dividends from your ward.