Does your child resist going to school?

Does your child resist going to school?

After a pandemic induced gap of 2 years, most schools are open now. KG kids are also coming to school. In the beginning, most children in pre-primary and primary grades resist going to school. For educated parents, it creates a dilemma…How can my child refuse to go to school? Is school not a welcoming place?  For many working professionals, it appears to be a dream shattering. They got their children admitted to fancy schools, have ensured all comforts and then the kids resist going to school. They jump to the conclusion…There is something wrong with the child otherwise why would she refuse to go to school?

I think we don’t need specialized knowledge to understand the challenge.

Accept the challenge!

Don’t dismiss what your ward is experiencing. For you, it’s a school where the race for the great life begins, for the kids, it's a shift from the comfortable, loosely structured home environment to an emotionally uncomfortable, strictly structured school environment. As an adult when you shift the workplace, you too take time to adjust, you too feel anxiety, you too have acceptance issues, and you too miss your family. Remember! You have several degrees from universities, these kids have just learned to walk properly, and they are yet to articulate their feelings…They often express it by shouting and crying. Accept, it's difficult for them. Your kids tell you…Mama, school is boring! Accept it. Because this is how he/she is experiencing it. Your reality is different from the reality of your child. You are not supposed to sit at a comparatively uncomfortable desk for 5 hours, your kids do, you don’t have to wait for the permission to speak, your kids do.

Tell them you don’t have a choice, not that School is a great place! Let kids discover it. For kids, it's like shifting from an open sea to a bathing pool. Where everything can be controlled. They don't have a problem with the water, they have a problem with the notion of ‘control’. Even for adults, it takes some time. For kids, control kills joy. At this stage, no amount of intellectual discussion will help. Just empathies! If you have some childhood memories, remember how you either resisted or submitted. There is no third alternative.

Teachers and schools can make some difference in the process of acculturation, but unfortunately, they don’t work in isolation. The parents impose their ambition on schools, they don’t have a choice but to design everything which may satisfy the ambition of the parents. Don’t blame schools, it’s our collective dogmatic idea of success that is forcing schools to run mechanically and ignore all the human aspects of learning. Class 1 kids are being made to sit for 5 hours in many schools.

In this whole process, teachers are the crucial persons who could make a lot of difference. Alas! They could make some decisions! They have a battery of supervisors to report to. Their activities are not planned to cater to the psycho-social and emotional needs of kids, they are accountable to their supervisors. Some teachers who are yet to be a machine can only cry with the child, the weight of the system is heavier than their capacity to challenge it.

The urgency which you feel that teachers should be responsive and he/she should cater to the individual needs of the students, to find a way forward, Just do one thing…Once you go for admission, enquire about the teachers: their educational background, their pay structure, their service conditions, etc. Once you start asking these questions, the focus will shift. School management will realize that its teachers whom parents are looking for not the bricks and mortars. Most of the school management in the last few decades have developed an understanding that school means fancy buses, designer classrooms, smart boards…but not the teachers. But as you realize now, none of these symbols of good schools can comfort the emotional needs of your kids. Reimagine school, look for teachers, your questions have the power to bring teachers back to the classroom with the agency, then you can question the teachers. Otherwise, for schools, teachers are scapegoats.

Beware of Intellectual discourse

Intellectual discourse doesn’t work at this level. I had a conversation with my daughter!

I was telling her

"Schooling will give you greater freedom. You can move anywhere, you can travel, work, as per your choice"

After listening to me carefully, she replied…Why can’t I have all these, right now? What’s the need of going to school for achieving this?

I didn't have an answer. The only trick that I know…Acknowledge, Yes, it’s a boring place, I know you feel agitated!

 There will be a day when she will get used to it or she will accept her fate as most of us have done. When? I don't know. Will depend on various factors.

What is your child facing and going to face in the school? If you want to understand it through a scholarly piece, here I quote the one from the book, ‘Researching School Experiences’.

“The implicit representation of children is rather like that of industrial raw material awaiting processing and the addition of added value. Various strengths and weaknesses in the functioning of the educational machine are considered, but the assumed passivity of pupils is conveyed by the almost complete absence of any direct account of their perspectives, experiences or quality of life. Education, in this account, is something that is done to children, not with children, and still less by children. Indeed, at a time when the dominant view among many politicians and the media is that the ‘old orthodoxies’ of teachers cannot be trusted, there seems to be even less reason to listen to the voices of the pupils who are on the receiving end of the pressure for improving standards in basic skills.”