Global, international, world mayhem

A few weeks ago, as I was driving around Gurgaon, I noticed a set of new hoardings announcing the launch of Paras World School which promises to be your child's best friend. The hoardings caught my attention, especially since all this while I was under the impression that Paras supplied milk (and maybe ghee) and had forayed into hospitals and real estate at some point.

Well, it has and it's clearly planes, trains and automobiles for the Paras group as it has now forayed further into education. It has set up a new world school that offers a "spectrum seed" curriculum that is "designed to recognise individual strengths and enable students to become successful learners and confident individuals" (and all this while I thought all schools were trying to do this). The curriculum has something to do with Harvard University and a project it did with some Italian institution.

Well, suffice to say that Paras World School is not alone. At last count - this is my own unmethodical, unscientific count (with some help from Wikipedia and the number of yellow buses I see whizzing around me) - there are another 50 to 55 world, global and international schools all within a 50-km radius right here within Gurgaon.

Another new world school, spread over a 10-acre campus in Haryana's Rewari, to open its doors recently is the OPY (Om Prakash Yadav) World School. The school, set up by the Rao Mohar Singh Education Society, intends to offer both ICSE and IGCSE curriculum to students. Its first batch is to start this academic session.

Maybe simply due to the difficulty in pronouncing the name, Kunskapsskolan is another one that caught my attention the other day. This turned out to be a tie-up between Gyandarshan Eduventures and a Swedish group of "knowledge schools". The aim of this one is to offer the learner the ability to be a part of "vasudev kutumbakam"which translates from Sanskrit (for us all pre-Modi and Irani ignoramuses) in English as "the world is a family".

Phew. Someone needs to sit down and do a thorough count of the number of world, global and international schools in the few kilometres that constitute Gurgaon. Almost every week, one new school is added to this list. Add to this the new global and world schools in Noida and several in Delhi - many of which have simply added world, global or international to their name - and we have quite an impressive list out there.

What boggles the mind is whether someone - anyone - has examined, studied, analysed the quality offered by these schools. Has any kind of inspection been done? Does someone vet the kind of fees being charged? Are these money-making rackets operating as societies claiming to be offering world-class education?

That aside, some other questions come to my mind. One, can anyone - just anyone - set up a school? Or does there need to be some experience, check of ability or credentials that our regulators need? Can, for instance, someone with a police record or someone out on bail set up a school? Does the rule for Parliament - murderers, rapists and criminals are all part and parcel until proved guilty - hold true for school managements too?

Second, does the school need to offer quality or deliver on what it promises. Strangely, most of the international, global and world schools actually offer only either ICSE or CBSE courses at the end of the day - primarily because that is what their teachers are qualified to teach. Yet, for some reason, almost all of them call themselves global, international or world schools. Is it fine if a school claims to be "international, global or world" even though it offers a wholly Indian curriculum? Most of these schools charge fees equivalent to international schools but many do not offer anything different from, say, a Kendriya Vidyalaya.

Third, do schools today need vision, leadership, values, ethics, principals or can we make do with large, glass and chrome buildings instead? Do we actually need schools and education that mould character as Mahatama Gandhi argued? I know this may sound a bit old fashioned, but in our time, parents usually sent their children to "institutions" as opposed to buildings and large fancy campuses.

Are many of these world, international and global schools money-making rackets that play on parental insecurities - unchecked and failing to deliver any quality due to lack of regulation and oversight? I won't be surprised if that's the case.

anjulibhargava@gmail.com