How can children be made equal stakeholders in their education?

As a parent of a child in senior school, I have a real-time window into the uncertainty that has gripped the students. The syllabus is changed but books are not available, subjects are suddenly introduced, subjects are suddenly taken away. Some of the children, however, have not lost their sense of humour. A friend’s 14-year-old daughter with her characteristic deadpan humour remarked, “As the great philosopher Geet said in Jab We Met: Bas Babaji, ab iss raat mein aur koi excitement mat dena. Boring bana do ab iss raat ko. My thoughts exactly…I would like my year to have no more twists and turns. 2026, please now be plain vanilla normal.”

I can understand this plea for normalcy. This generation of Gen Alpha kids has had a disrupted childhood, pivoting to online schooling during the covid-19 pandemic, then returning to regular classrooms, then back online time and time again when the air quality worsens every autumn. Their schedules have been changed, and social lives upturned by geopolitical tensions, increasing climate disasters, and more. We keep calling on this generation to be resilient even as adults continue to throw curveballs at them.

I can’t help but wonder if terms like “agency of the child” and “freedom of choice” are mere fancy phrases to be discussed at social gatherings or printed in brochures of progressive schools? Have we become global only when it comes to the brands we sport and the places we travel to, without really broadening our approach toward child development, which, in my view, is critical for building a more empathetic world? And by “we”, I don’t place the onus solely on parents (who often suffer along with kids) but on policymakers, educationists, counsellors and psychologists.

I have spent the past week speaking to authors, teachers and most importantly students about ways children can be equal stakeholders in decisions that will impact them the most. R.S., a class X student from Delhi, is urging the adults in her life to read Maria Montessori’s The Secret of Childhood. She came across an explainer on YouTube and has since been trying to understand the approach enshrined in it: following the child’s interests and offering choices—without punishment or reward—right from an early development stage.

Mumbai-based psychology student Shannaaya Chopra, 20, feels education ought to be based on “exploration”. The author of the young adult fantasy book, The Turning, says she is grateful her college doesn’t force students to choose a major or a minor subject in the first year itself. Rather, initial terms are spent delving into international languages and social and environmental sciences so that they get to make informed decisions later on based on aptitude and interest. Having studied in the ICSE board, she credits her parents for letting her choose the option of dropping maths in class VIII. “Society puts a lot of pressure regarding maths and science. You are perceived as stupid if you are not good in either of these subjects. That is really not true. You don’t have to excel in something you don’t have an aptitude for to prove your worth,” she says.

Y.D. from Mumbai has nursed an ambition to be a veterinarian since he was little. The 14-year-old feels that while pursuing the academic curriculum with a certain rigour is important, learning shouldn’t just be confined to doing well in exams. “Instead of assessing us solely through marks scored in a particular exam, you should look at the effort put in by a student throughout the year,” he says. “Why not include more experiment-based learning to let kids get more hands-on experience? You could include sessions on stargazing in the evening; have a more flexible timetable to allow students to catch up on learning that they might have missed out on or are struggling with.”

Some of his friends have confided in him that their parents are nudging them towards a career in engineering, when some of them would like to take up digital journalism or become an entrepreneur. “We are of the opinion that this should be the decision of the child alone,” he adds.

That also brings us to the question: What does democratic decision-making in education entail? Matthew Raggett, a British educator, former headmaster of The Doon School and author of How Your Child Can Win in Life, believes this would mean including both student and staff voice in the day-to-day working. And this needs to be systemic, not tokenistic in the form of a lesson or a workshop. “The International Baccalaureate system expects that when new units of inquiry are being started, teachers find out from the students what they already know, what questions they have, what they want to know, and what the shared ideas make them think about and feel; this is the very essence of inquiry-based learning and the inquiry cycle,” he says. When the upcoming school year is being planned, the students are asked what they thought worked well and not so well last time, what they want to know or are worried about, and how they might be involved in the planning of any events.

At The Doon School, Raggett and team changed the structure of the school day in 2017 through a process that involved putting up everyone’s ideas in the library on notice boards so that people could add to, annotate and highlight the best ideas by others. “We used this as the basis for the school council to agree on what would be piloted before fixing the changes. It’s hard to say no when the problems are solved by a community’s consensus. Of course, it takes time, and you may not get the answer that you want, but you do get the right answer,” he adds.

There is a need to decentralise the system of power in the hands of a small group of staff or students over the rest. In his view, prefectorial systems, house captains and sports captains seemed like a reasonable structure through which students could take some responsibility under the watchful eye of masters and mentors. “…but in the context of lack of professional mentorship, they became an institutionalised system of entitlement, which undermined the very notion of leadership that grand old schools with these systems talked about creating; [and became] the very definition of authoritarianism,” says Raggett. That environment of power, privilege and punishment has begun to change with the introduction of Duty of Care programmes, and Safeguarding and Child Protection courses that schools require their staff to participate and become certified in.

That learning ought to be an activity of great joy would be stating the obvious—but it is something that needs to be reiterated. Author and music instructor Nandita Basu feels classrooms are not the problem, rather “classrooms with boundaries are”. “I would like to see a classroom where the mind is allowed to engage with nature and animals. What if children could make or learn music in the presence of animals? What if there was time given every day to hug a tree? I think we would have a healed society with very little angst and rage,” she says. Could the learning system help a child learn how to spend time with themselves? Basu believes the ability to sit in one’s own company is the greatest gift any teaching experience can bring—not in the pursuit of doing something but the sole attempt to be with one's self.

You can refer to Sisters at New Dawn by Varsha Seshan, author, teacher and founder of three book clubs for children of various ages, as a thorough exploration of the utopian education system. The story focuses on New Dawn High School, an unusual learning centre, where students choose the skills they want to pursue. The subjects are divided into real life skills such as languages and math, subjects with high/medium/low chances of application. Seshan wrote about the LCAs as the wackiest and most imaginative of them all—Power of Sleepwalking, Aliens and Superheroes, Maths and Beauty, and Pot of Gold, which explores the mythical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.