Going to school is no child's play

Unstructured play time often has a more lasting educational impact than an open textbook in a classroom, writes the author

She’s wasting her time playing in the park like this,” Sunita fretted as she watched her two-year-old daughter chasing a ball. “It’s time we somehow got her into a preschool.” Having always believed that unstructured play time often has a more lasting educational impact than an open textbook in a classroom, I felt that the longer her child could stay out of school, the better. When I said as much to Sunita, she clearly disagreed. “These days, even playschools require toddlers to know their ABC,” she said. “Neither my husband nor I are educated; the only way we can provide proper stimulation to our child is by sending her to school.” My ensuing conversation with Sunita made me realise that going to school these days was no child’s play.

 
It was a jungle out there in the preschool world, Sunita told me. Three-year-olds arrived there, already pros at going to class. “Many of them have been to all sorts of classes for a year before they start preschool,” said she. “But for a working mother like me, simply ensuring my toddler is bathed and fed is hard enough — where can I find the time, energy and money to take her to different classes?” The system was, she felt, skewed in favour of the better off, non-working mothers, who could afford to do all this. “I feel that even now, when my child starts school, she will be at a disadvantage compared to these other children.” All this, of course, depended on whether Sunita’s daughter was able to make it to a decent preschool at all. “The odds are stacked high against parents like us who aren’t educated but willing to spend on their child’s education,” she said.

 
A couple of days later, I ran into Sunita in the park again. She looked rather worked up when I asked her for an update to her preschool saga. They’d had no luck with the nearby preschools. Apparently, they were full up even though Sunita was applying for admission in the next academic session by which time her daughter would also meet the age eligibility criteria. “Till now, my 10-year-old niece used to watch her after school so that I could work as a domestic help in the afternoon,” said she. “But now the child is getting so frisky and naughty, that keeping her home is getting hard.” She was coming to realise that if she had to continue working, school was possibly the best (and only) long-term childcare option for her daughter. Till the new academic session began, she said, her husband and she were thinking of putting the child in the local anganwadi. “At least she’ll learn something by being around other kids there,” she said.

 

Sunita and her husband visited the anganwadi nearby and were impressed. “Children were playing happily there while their mothers went off to work,” she said. “It seemed ideal.” The catch was that they didn’t have a vacancy. “When they asked us to come back after six months, I felt like crying with frustration,” Sunita said. “By then, my daughter would be old enough to go to preschool anyway.”
 
Trying to put her problems in some sort of perspective, I said that perhaps they shouldn’t worry so much about preschool when the real challenge would be to get the child into a good school two years hence. Sunita looked at her two-year-old, who, blissfully oblivious to her mother’s heartburn, was playing happily. “In my village in Bihar, the sarpanch has to beg parents to allow their daughters to go to school,” said she moodily. “Maybe we should just move back there.”