I spent 12 years of my early life there. Spending eight long hours every day at the same old buildings filled with delightful and exuberant children of different ages is not as easy as one thinks it to be. What is more, is the never-ending homework that accompanied only added to the hatred of many towards school. Undoubtedly, school is annoying and boring with a lot of effort going towards attaining good grades. Nonetheless, school is highly important; hence, the reason why our parents pressurized us to work so hard. Giving school a miss would have meant missing out an important stage of our life. Thus, out of the few negatives that come across going to school, it definitely has several positives as well.
School is the basic foundation of knowledge being imparted to a child. It gives a chance to children to acquire knowledge on various fields of education, such as people, literature, history, mathematics, politics, and other numerous subjects. Gone are the days when school meant just learning the events given in a history chapter or solving tough mathematical problems or reciting poems and sonnets!
Nowadays, school has become the first stepping stone in the life of a child, wherein he/she learns a lot more than just rote learning. Developing hobbies, refining them, learning basic etiquettes, getting skilled at multi tasking, developing social skills are some of the many things that a school equips a child with.
Having said this, schools especially in India are given little credit for their contribution to one’s success and no mention in the success stories because they largely ignore their alumni asset. Many progressive school managements are now rising up to claim what is rightfully theirs. It is rather surprising how the schools are literally in the dark about most of their alumni and how engaging with a subset through sporadic occasions like annual reunions seems to be the trusted mantra, and this in an age, where literally anyone can connect across the globe and deep relevant engagement is possible. Schools need to start engaging with their alumni beyond nostalgia. This network can then surpass the utility of other networks for employment, entrepreneurship, personal growth, life skills, and networking.
Everyone knows that the newly appointed Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal is from IIT Bombay but nobody knows the school he is from. Satya Nadella of Microsoft, on the other hand has spoken about his school Hyderabad Public School on multiple occasions.
True outcome for a school is a student’s journey after school. No better ambassador for the school than its Alumni. While IIT/AIIMS admission can be one such measure, it surely is not the only one. Diversity in career choices, corporate achievers, entrepreneurs, sports accomplishments are a few others. It would be great to have more Indian achievers attribute some credit to their schools in addition to the IITs/NITs/Med Schools they graduated from.
I am a proud Tiny Tot, St. Josephian, DAVian, Chinmayite and DPSite (well.... father was in a transferrable job, so had many great institutions contributing to shaping me to what I am today)
