Schooling for the Present: An Exploration of Raising and Educating Children with Attention

Abstract

Anxiety and stress are words increasingly associated with Indian childhoods, especially over the last decade or two. One extreme marker of this is student suicide, but behind this tragic fact is the psychological state of millions of children who experience considerable distress. A root cause of this is our view of schooling as an ‘investment’ in their children for the sake of future ‘dividends’. This has become so ingrained and normalised that we have crossed a line from acknowledging the problem of childhood stress to endorsing it. I believe we share a collective responsibility to urgently re-examine some deeply held and shared assumptions. In this essay, I lay out a few different arguments for why and how we could rigorously and responsibly examine these assumptions. I end with a tentative sharing of a possible way of ‘schooling for the present’.