Sometimes back, Delhi High Court gave a directive that no
more tests and interviews be conducted for Junior KG admissions. What
a great relief to the tormented parents! Parents in India, start
spending sleepless nights when their child reaches three. This is the
age when the child has to be sent to a Montessery or kindergarten
school. Decades earlier, children had two major fears – inoculation
against small pox and admission in elementary schools. The sight of
Municipal employees with injection needles in their hands, would send
shivers down the spines of the toddlers and they would run hither and
thither like street dogs, when a dog van is sighted, or like hawkers,
when they see a Khairnar on the prowl. Children considered to be
naughty and with high degree of nuisance value at home were sent to
schools even before the admission age and the children deprecated it
for denying them freedom and considered schools as demons, determined
to destroy games of all sorts.
Today, a child, before admission
to the school, is expected to know what he has to learn only in the
school. Both the children and parents have also to clear the tests
before the children are admitted to the school. Many a times, parents
find it difficult to clear the test, much less the children. The
grueling interview for the three years old and its thirty plus
parents, relegates IAS interview to the realm of the insignificant, in
terms of extent, intensity and irrelevance.
Entrance
examination for kindergarten admission needs elaborate preparation.
Answers to earlier years’ questions would be ascertained and
detailed enquiries would be made with children of the earlier batches
in the neighbourhood or even schools not so good, to ascertain the
method of thinking of the school authorities and their mental
equilibrium. To make the preparation more intense and meaningful,
parents would go beyond text books, and spend hours in libraries,
browsing through books on general knowledge, frequent and familiarise
themselves with quiz masters of even quack variety and learn to
distinguish between a hippo and a rhino. Children are put to classes
where mock interviews are conducted so that they gain the confidence
to face the onslaught in the interview hall. Even seminars are
sponsored by social organisations to provide added information and
answering techniques.
IITs’ JEE (Joint Entrance
Examinations) are, perhaps based on the Junior KG tests –lessons not
learnt earlier, complex concepts to be applied in complicated
situations and unnerving size of applicants. Guides are available
aplenty, but none of them take you nearer to the sought after
selection. Every child and parent’s ambition is to get selected for
Junior KG and and later at IIT through JEE. If the ‘Target’ course
of a Brilliant Tutorials starts at 9th standard for IIT JEE aspirants,
for Junior KG admission, ‘Target’ like training would start after
the first birth day itself. Before the entrance tests, Crash Courses
in different topics would be covered. If it is Trigonometry for IIT,
it is colour and size of the tamarind tree for the toddlers –
equally exasperating. A selection at Junior KG is certainly to be
celebrated, as one has reached celebrity status like an IIT alumnus.
As the quality of of entrance tests for IIT and Junior KG is well
known, there is no stigma attached when there is a failure to get
selected, and yet, parents would feel deprived off, missing an
opportunity to talk about their children.
Whereas in IIT JEE,
parents are spared of the ordeal, for the Junior KG tests, parents’
performance takes precedence over even the child’s readiness to
learn. If in the IIT counseling, allotment of seats is based on the
rank in the JEE and the choice of the students, for the Junior KG, it
is the parents’ rank, their place in the social hierarchy and
ability to contribute and enter into a deal, that enhances, if not
ensures, the chance of selection.
Clearance of the entrance
test certainly adds value to the IIT student, atleast in terms of
marketability of his skills, in industries and abroad, and for the
Junior KG students, admission in Jesuits managed schools that stand
singled out for quality. And finally, when one sits for the IIT JEE
and remembers his junior KG entrance tests, he/she would approvingly
quote ‘ Wordsworth’s prophetic words that ‘Child is The Father
of Man’.
