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’.