To be able to go to school, a three-year-old must demonstrate an ability to sit still for half an hour, display ‘attentiveness’ and exhibit supreme self-confidence, so that a four-member interview panel (comprising only adults) is convinced she has enough ‘merit’ to get admission in their institution. As a result, paranoid parents are enrolling their wards in ‘coaching classes’ at as early an age as two.
Three-year-old Pankhi Vohra is convinced it was a red dog. Her mother, who had been waiting anxiously outside, suspects it may have been a brown dog. Or a red fox. “They showed me a red dog,” repeats Pankhi. But her mother is having a panic attack. “It probably was a fox and she didn’t notice the bushy tail, or she got the dog’s colour all wrong,” she mutters to herself.
Pankhi knows all about how to give an interview. After all, she has trained for this day for more than a year now. “Sit straight, shoulders back, and answer only in full sentences,” she says, mimicking her private “interview” tutor, who comes home for their training sessions. She also goes to a regular play school, the last few months of which were devoted to preparing the kids for the upcoming school admission process.
Garima Vohra, like most city parents, started planning her daughter’s education two years in advance. She was clear which schools she wanted her daughter to go to: it had to be either Cathedral and John Connon School at Fort, or Villa Theresa High School at Peddar Road or Dhirubhai Ambani International School at Bandra Kurla Complex — the best of the lot.
Just like IIT-JEE or CAT
Preparing students for entrance exams has always been big business, especially with the engineering and MBA admission exams getting more and more competitive by the day. However, the latest clientele of the coaching industry is a much younger age-group: two and three-year-olds, whose parents hope that extra attention might get their children into the most coveted schools in the city. Most enrol their kids for extra classes as early as the age of 2. Vohra claims that she knows of plenty of children who didn’t made it through to the ‘good’ schools mainly because they never went to any of these coaching classes.
Most schools have an interviewing process that lasts for about 20 minutes to half an hour. A panel consisting of four to five teachers usually interviews the child. Parents are not allowed to sit with the child during this period. They test children on their motor skills (co-ordination of muscle and eye movement that is tested by giving children jigsaw and picture puzzles to solve), attentiveness, and ‘confidence levels’.
Children are also asked to ‘introduce themselves’ and judged on how fluently they speak. Then, they are asked to identify a picture or an object and describe it in a few lines, recite the alphabet song or a nursery rhyme or two. Due to the emphasis on fluency in English, teaching the child his/her own mother tongue often takes a backseat.
Parents only converse in English in the presence of the child so he/she can pick up words faster.
Some schools have a two-stage interview process. In the first stage, parents and children are interviewed together. The short-listed children then move on to the second, “individual interview” round.
“I feel like my three-year-old is preparing for an IIT or an IIM exam. It’s that strenuous for a child his age. My son is extremely restless. The training had to start with teaching him how to not get intimidated when a stranger asks a question, and how to sit still for half an hour,” says Shobhna Mehta.
10-month waiting lists
Mehta’s son Kaushik, 3, has not only been going to play school but also attending two extra classes — “specialised classes” that train the kid for an interview process in a different school. Kaushik appeared for four school interviews this year and has already been ‘rejected’ by Dhirubhai Ambani International School at Bandra Kurla Complex. “I have no idea what happened inside the interview room. My son refuses to talk about it,” says Mehta. “There are certain teachers you go to if you want your kid to get into a certain school, and another set if you want your child trained according to the interview pattern of some other school. The worst part is that there are 10-month long waiting lists for enrolment in these classes. Some teachers have as many as four batches a day.”
Children, very often, are not even aware that they are going through a screening process. “Why put them through something they don’t even understand?” asks Anuradha Sovani, head of department of applied psychology, Mumbai University. What they do understand and feel is the parents’ angst. There are children who refuse to say a word during the interview process, says Sovani, because they’ve been told not to talk to a stranger. Once they are out they have to face the ire of their parents. “The child is not even old enough know the difference [between a stranger you shouldn’t talk to and a stranger who’s part of an interview panel].”
Most children who train for the interviews are transported directly from their play school to extra classes, either by an anxious mother or a driver, leaving them with very little play time. The classes cost anything between Rs2,000 to Rs4,000 per month and depend largely on the school the parent is focussing on.
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