Heat up: Western summer frying our kids

Globalisation has changed the Indian Education System beyond recognition. One would need an ‘Indian edition for Dummies’ today to decode the new boards of education that now define our school campuses. For starters, you have SSC, CBSE and ICSE boards which remained Indian in content but added layers of complexity later. The last decade brought in dramatically new standards of curriculum that reflect what progressive schools in the West teach — IB (International Bacca-laureate managed by a Swiss Board), IGSE (Cambridge-based) and Rudolf Steiner schools (Germany).

The new boards have become buzzwords which made many parents, especially returning Indians, patronise them. Many liked the idea their kids will now study European History, Mandarin and Thai,  juggling with courses in Art & Design, humanities and the sciences — but they overlooked Telugu, Hindi, etc. Hyderabad and other cities have been a seabed to such changes widely embraced by parents with lots of good intentions to see their kids truly globalise with counterparts overseas.

Over a dozen schools now offer either IB-based or Cambridge-based school curriculums apart from options to switch back and forth to ICSE. Most of these changes may be good at an intellectual level but at a social level and physical levels, it is disrupting an ecosystem that kids like us got used to in the good old days of the ‘80s.

The most important disruption is in the adjustment to weather conditions. By default, the IB and the IGSE (aka CIE) board is followed in over 100 countries but their academic schedule shows scant regard for the extreme summer conditions of tropical countries such as India.

So despite summer heat touching a decade-high in cities including Hyderabad, kids in Indian schools of these boards have to endure a good part of summer until April-end. In case of IGSE it is worse: the students get their summer break coinciding with vacations in the US or Europe from mid-June to end of August.

In the ‘80s, kids had a simpler regimen that made childhood seem a breeze; you had morning schools in March, finished exams by the month’s end, waited for results in a week or two, took off for vacations, perhaps returned in May to buy the books for the next class, enjoy another month of recess before the school finally re-opens in June.

These days, the schedule is more punishing and unmindful of Indian weather conditions. Kids now finish their exams by Feb-end, take a week’s break, get into the new classes from March which go on till almost April-end. When one compares this experience to yesteryears, students and teachers arrived fresher and more enthusiastic in the new academic year in June than today’s students.

All this, in the name of globalisation to dovetail with the international academic schedules. From this year, even local students join this annual rigmarole: SSC Board in Telangana started implementing the schedule of classes till April alongwith ICSE and CBSE boards.

We are not against globalisation in education. But if the objective is to sync Indian Education System without regard for local inputs and conditions, there is a cost to pay for: curtailed childhood, over-worked students who don’t know Indian History or vernacular languages but speak fluent Korean and fatigued teachers.

For decades, we followed a simple academic schedule designed by the British —they mapped every inch of the subcontinent and decided those two months in Summer are best for students to remain indoors. The temperatures have shot up atleast eight degrees since 1947 and a city like Hyderabad has seen the mercury soaring to a decade’s high but the schedules for school-going kids become more daunting.

There are other ramifications too from this disruption, on teacher supply, dollarised students, mismatch in vacations between neighbourhood kids with different schedules, etc. But the crucial question here is is — why are our educators lacking the know-how about local weather even as they implement grand ideas in Education.