Children or lab rats?

We all went to nursery or playgroup or Montessori or whatever it was called. We spent a couple of hours there playing with toys and the other kids and learning a few letters, numbers and nursery rhymes. My brother started when he was two and a half, and my mother agrees he was way too young for nursery. I started when I was three.

I have many Montessori memories. My cousin was in a class on the other side of the ‘what seemed big to us’ hall. Garden Montessori was at the top of our road, just a minute’s walk from home. So on most days our grandfather would walk the two of us to our Montessori and pick us up. On the way home he would buy us chocolate, ‘seeni bola’ and other sweets. We seemed to have loved going to Montessori because, according to my mother, we never cried. I don’t think we really cared or realized we had to wake up in the morning, get into our uniform and walk up the road with our school bags.

I remember having fun with my friends, playing outside and singing along. We had concerts, where I was once dressed in a Kimono and another time played in the band. We were happy and we loved spending time away from home.

My cousin is going to hate me for this, but one of the funniest memories would be the time she refused to cut her birthday cake without me. I remember standing there, in a class full of strange kids and also walking across that hall, not sure where I was going.

Seeya used to pick us up at the Montessori gate, which was directly in front of the entrance to the Montessori building, just a few steps away. Anyway, my cousin got lost and when I got to Seeya, and we couldn’t find my cousin, he asked me to go back and find her. She was standing at the entrance crying!

Now to a memory that doesn’t involve my cousin or her cry baby ways. So the class next to my one had a bathroom with a bathtub. Or so we believed. So I was sent to that class for a day. I recently learnt it was sort of an exchange program between classes. So anyway, since I was there, it was up to me to see if the bathroom had a snake in it. There was a story among our kids that there was a huge snake in that bathroom’s tub. So I used the bathroom, found no snake but I think I lied about it, saying I saw a huge snake.

My mother teaches grade one kids and I was shocked when she told me that when a student is absent, the teachers have to complete the notes. When I was in those lower grades, no one ever completed my notes or told me to write things down. I went to a semi-government school and our classroom alone had 42 students. Every classroom had a cane and we knew we would get a good whack if we misbehaved. We ran around on a dusty field with no grass, under the hot sun. We bruised our knees and elbows, knocked our heads and we were given the freedom to be kids.

Today’s kids are treated like pets, or lab rats. They are taught to do something, they are observed and are not allowed to do anything they haven’t been instructed to do. Not only do books teach things students of that age can’t even understand but they are also extremely overpriced. The kids think life is like a chaptered book. You can only take steps in the order you’ve been instructed to take.

Further, today’s schools create a walled world for the kids to live in. For the fourteen or so years they spend in school, a student goes from class to class, book to book and pass exam after exam. They don’t have scars to show off. They live protected lives and don’t know that someday soon, the mollycoddling would end.

It’s not like we lived the harder but more real life. No, our parents or grandparents are the ones who claim to have lived through Satan-like teachers and days of freedom and happiness. However, looking at today’s school students, I feel sorry for them, even though I left school just two years ago. Once a teacher hit a classmate with an umbrella. None of my books were complete and no teacher gave a damn. We learnt the way children should. By observing, through punishment. And this is why, I think, we are more down to earth and human. Why we are better at adapting. Why we aren’t too picky about what we eat or wear.

Back then schools let children make mistakes. Today, schools want perfect attendance. Perfect exam results. They don’t look for children, students. They look for lab rats.