Kashmir schools have opened again today after more than 100 days of curfews. Parents are torn between having to choose between the present safety of their children, and ensuring their futures.
Hurriyat Chairman Syeed Ali Geelani is telling parents to keep their kids home because the majority of the people killed in the violence since June have been teenagers. That’s like saying ‘let’s punish the living siblings of the dead by sacrificing their futures to the cause that they died for’.
The State Education Ministry has put out a comprehensive plan for the re-opening of schools in Kashmir, including providing a fleet of school buses for teachers and students, and stating that exams will go ahead as scheduled at the end of September. Pity the poor school kids who have to sit for their exams after missing out on a quarter of their year’s school workload.
Here in lucky Holland, at the parents and teachers meeting at my daughter’s school, we were told by her sixth grade teacher that if our kids were so much as five minutes late in the morning three times in a month, there would be official action taken and fines imposed. She went on to say that if our kids are feeling a bit sick and ask to stay at home occasionally, we shouldn’t allow it unless they’re a breath away from being hospitalized, because a day’s schooling is such a big deal that they will suffer with each day missed. And she’s not a particularly strict teacher - it’s the general line here. All over The Netherlands, parents who try to take their kids out of school for an unauthorized extension of their holidays can face a fine of 100 euros a day. They even post extra guards at the now defunct European border checkposts on the Fridays before the commencement of spring and summer school holidays to ensure that parents aren’t trying to beat the holiday traffic jams by sneaking their kids out of that last half day of school.
I’ve heard complaints about these draconian measures, but I can’t help thinking how lucky we are to be at this end of the spectrum, where education is taken so very seriously.
I hope that Kashmir will not follow the trend of its neighbours like Afghanistan where school girls and teachers are risking their lives every day just by the subversive act of going to school, or Pakistan, which spends less than a paltry 2% a year of GDP on its education but has still announced massive cuts this fiscal year. Kashmiris have always prided themselves on the quality of education of their children, and the fact that they’ve always been so successful in business and white collar jobs. Let’s hope that education does not become yet another casualty of this decades long conflict.
Any nation which undermines its education is lobotomising its future citizens.
on Sep 27th, 2010 at 8:13 pm
A generation is being lost in Kashmir with the traumatic exposure to war and consequential loss of humanity therein. What is even more of a priority now is not to physically lose this generation to the continued fighting itself. The children and teachers should be evacuated to a safe haven to preserve what continuity can be had. Sitting through the exams at the end of this month can only result in placing more students back a year, thus giving more incentive to those wishing to disrupt and cripple normal life in Kashmir the encouragement to maintain the fighting. The educational system will have to be reorganized along emergency wartime measures rather than random gambling on daily modes of operation such as high risk, repetitive transportation.