Just every now and then there comes along an idea which makes us feel some form of nirvana might be attained in our benighted land. Quite a few
adults, having suffered the travails of the school system in India, would be interested in the news that the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, 2008, was introduced last week in the Rajya Sabha.
If the Bill has its way, no school in the land can fail or turf out children for reasons of poor performance until a certain stage. The onus of responsibility for academic progress would, in fact, rest on the schools themselves. Now this is reason enough to cause rapturous joy among the youngsters, hitherto victims of the undeniable tyranny of an early-age rat race.
But the Bill would also possibly rekindle or maybe even relieve some of the suppressed anguish of many a grown Indian. There would doubtless be many amongst us who sometimes still, years after the ordeal has passed, wake up with the peculiar and un-nameable dread associated with having to face that school examination with an empty mind.
And though there might be some residual cheer to be had from the fact that future generations might be allowed some peace, at least in early life, nothing really can cure that memory of distilled fear that school instilled in many a tremulous young heart. That, alas, was merely inevitable karma for many of us.
The implications of this Bill are most profound. Indeed, this could well be the locus of the socio-political change we so badly need. To envisage a possibility where children, the whole lot of them, actually enjoy going to school, and even — though one remains timid on this point — perhaps actually learn something in their formative years, means nothing short of radical change.
This could spell the formation of constructive, reasonable and untraumatised generations. Which is precisely what we need. The authors of the Bill must post-haste be declared national treasures.
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