On marks, knowledge and the holistic upbringing we owe our children (italic)
I was watching a Marathi movie recently when a single scene stopped me cold.
A Marathi medium school — modest, ordinary, the kind of building that has seen generations of children pass through its doors — was being torn down. In its place, an international school was going to rise. Shiny. Modern. The kind of building that photographs well and impresses at dinner parties.
And I sat there thinking: we have confused the container for the content. The building for the knowledge. The address for the education.
That confusion, I think, is at the heart of everything wrong with how we approach learning today.
The Show Has Replaced the Substance
Education has become, for many people, a performance.
Which school does your child go to? Which board — CBSE, ICSE, IB? Which medium? Which ranking? The questions come fast and they come loaded, because the answers are not really about education at all. They are about status. About what the school says about the family. About whether the building your child enters every morning is impressive enough to maintain your reputation in the circles you move in.
I have seen this around me more times than I can count. Parents for whom the name of the school matters more than what is actually taught inside it. For whom the fee structure is a signal of quality rather than the quality of thinking it produces. For whom a high-ranking institution is the goal, and whatever happens inside it — whether the child is curious, whether they are growing, whether they actually understand anything — is secondary.
And then there are the marks. The marks above everything.
If your child scores well, the method doesn’t matter. Nobody asks: did they understand it, or did they memorise it? Did they learn to think, or did they learn to reproduce the answer the examiner wants? Did the knowledge go in, or just the information?
Nobody checks for the practical. Theory is tested, boxed, graded, celebrated. But can the child apply it? Can they think on their feet? Can they solve something they haven’t seen before? That question is rarely asked. Because it doesn’t fit neatly on a report card.
Do They Even Know Where They Come From?
We talk about how great the world is. Parents look at their children with such awe — so much pride, so much love, so much hope.
But here is a simple question. Does your child know the regional fruit of their own state? The local vegetable, the special dish, the particular thing that belongs to the place they were born? Do they know a little of their own history, their own geography, the ground beneath their feet?
It sounds simple. Almost too simple to ask. But when I ask it around me, I find that most children don’t know. And when I say this matters, people look at me strangely. What’s the need? they say. What’s the need to know where you come from when you are busy preparing for the world?
I feel this deeply. You must know the things around you. The local, the rooted, the specific. Not because it will appear on an exam — it probably won’t — but because it makes you more knowledgeable in the truest sense. Because a child who knows their own region, their own language, their own history, stands on firmer ground than one who knows only what the syllabus requires.
Modern buildings, fancy names, great infrastructure — I understand their appeal. To a certain extent, these things matter. A good environment supports good learning. But they are the frame, not the painting. And we have started mistaking the frame for the art.
Schools are for knowledge. Not for all of this.
Knowledge Versus Education
There is a difference between education and knowledge, and I think we have forgotten it.
Education, as we practice it, is something that happens to you. You attend. You sit. You absorb what is given. You reproduce it when asked. You are graded. You move forward.
Knowledge is something different. Knowledge is what changes how you see. How you think. How you behave in a room, how you react under pressure, how you treat people who are different from you, how you hold yourself when things go wrong. Knowledge shapes you from the inside. Education, at its worst, only fills you from the outside.
I have watched children tell me they only make friends with those who score high marks. I laughed when I heard it — not because it was funny, but because I didn’t know what else to do with the sadness of it. Where is your innocence, I wanted to ask. Where is the part of you that plays and wonders and chooses a friend because they make you laugh, not because they rank well?
Is it always about that? Always about ranking, always about comparison, always about who is above and who is below? What happened to just being a child?
What My Mother Understood
I was lucky. My upbringing was different, and I know it.
My mother believed in something that most parents around her did not prioritise — holistic education. Not a concept she read in a parenting book. Just a quiet, consistent understanding that a child needs more than marks to become a full human being.
She made sure I played sports. She enrolled me in music. She pushed me toward activities that had nothing to do with a syllabus and everything to do with shaping who I was becoming. She made me tell stories — stories appropriate for my age, stories I had to construct myself — and I didn’t understand then what she was building. I do now. She was building my imagination. She was teaching me to find words for things, to sequence thoughts, to make something out of nothing. Today, when I sit down to write, I feel her in it.
She checked my language. She made me read in my mother tongue and in English. Not to make me impressive at school but because she understood that language is how you think, and the richer your language the richer your thinking.
And marks? They mattered to her, but they were never the whole picture. Knowledge mattered more. Whether I actually understood something mattered more. Whether I was growing into a person who could handle the world — that mattered most of all.
She was right. Everything she built in me then is what I use now. Not the syllabus. Not the board. Not the name of the school. The foundation she laid — curious, multilingual, imaginative, grounded in both sport and story — that is what has actually served me.
The Things We Have Stopped Teaching
My school had a rule. Every Gandhi Jayanti, we cleaned our own classroom.
Not the staff. Not the helpers. Us — the students, on our knees with brooms and dusters, cleaning the space we used every day. It sounds small. But it taught something that no textbook chapter can. That spaces need tending. That you are responsible for what surrounds you. That there is no task beneath you if it serves something you care about.
That is a life skill. Basic, unglamorous, essential.
And yet this is exactly the kind of thing we are quietly removing from education. The practical. The physical. The rooted. In its place we are adding more theory, more coaching, more preparation for exams that test memory over understanding.
We have stopped teaching sports seriously — not as a period you endure before the real subjects, but as a discipline that builds character, resilience, teamwork, and the ability to lose gracefully. We have stopped teaching music as a practice, art as a way of seeing, reading as a relationship with language and imagination. These are treated as extras, as rewards, as things you do if there is time left over after the important work is done.
But they are the important work. They are the things that make a person whole.
A child who only studies and never plays is not a more serious student. They are a less complete human being. A child who has never lost a game doesn’t know how to fail. A child who has never made something with their hands — painted, planted, built, cooked — has a gap in their understanding of the world that no amount of marks can fill.
We are producing children who score well and know very little. Who can answer questions on paper and struggle to hold a conversation. Who have been to the best schools and cannot name the tree outside their window.
That is not education. That is performance without substance.
What We Are Taking From Children
Does your child know how to hold a cricket bat?
Can they ride a bicycle? Do they know what it feels like to run until their lungs hurt and then laugh about it with a friend? Have they ever lost a game and learned to be gracious about it? Have they sat with an instrument and understood that some things take time, that progress is slow, that the point is not to be perfect but to keep showing up?
Because if they don’t know these things — if their childhood is entirely made up of classrooms and coaching centres and report cards — are they really having a childhood at all?
A child needs to play. Not as a reward for finishing homework. Not on a schedule between tuition and dinner. Just play — unstructured, ungraded, unobserved. The kind of play where they figure out who they are when nobody is watching and nothing is being assessed.
Sports teach you things no classroom can. How to lose. How to be part of something bigger than yourself. How to push your body. How to try again. Music teaches patience, discipline, the relationship between effort and beauty. Art teaches you to see. Stories teach you to imagine. Books teach you to think beyond your own experience and live, briefly, inside someone else’s.
These are not extras. These are the real education. The kind that stays in the body, in the instinct, in the character — long after every formula and date and chapter has been forgotten.
The Life on the Other Side
Imagine a school where marks are one measure among many. Where the child who cannot solve equations quickly but can draw, or sing, or lead a team on a field, is celebrated just as genuinely. Where Gandhi Jayanti means something — not a holiday, but a lesson in responsibility. Where children know their region, their language, their roots, and carry that knowledge with pride instead of indifference.
Imagine a child raised the way my mother raised me. Curious across many things. Comfortable in their body from years of sport. Patient from music. Imaginative from stories. Grounded in where they come from and confident about where they are going.
That child walks into the world differently. Not because they scored higher — maybe they didn’t. But because they know more. About themselves, about others, about the ground beneath their feet. They know how to fail and get up. How to work with people who are different from them. How to sit with difficulty and not fall apart.
That is what education was always supposed to produce. Not a rank. A person.
The building will be torn down eventually. The board will change. The syllabus will be revised. Every external thing we have placed so much weight on will, in time, be replaced by something newer and shinier.
What remains — the only thing that truly remains — is what was actually learned. Not memorised. Not performed. Learned. In the body, in the character, in the way a person moves through the world.
That is the education worth fighting for.
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