The "Underperforming" Child

Letter to people who run schools: On the Issue of “Weeding Out Under-performers”

Dear School Managers,

I send my child to you every morning, trusting you as a valuable partner in the process of making my child into a good person, a person who respects, appreciates and accepts diversity and a person who can think of a larger good in common for mankind.

I hope we are in sync – because there are what I believe are universal, never-to-be-compromised values which every child must grow up with a firm belief in.

You are her Role Models- in fact, my child picks up values from you far more than she is ready to pick up from me. That is the power and the reach of “the school and its attitude”.

So I believe she should see you

being fair and just, even in the most difficult of circumstances;
treating every being the same – with sensitivity love and respect;
putting in your very best effort to help every child grasp every concept;
focus on educating every child, rather than running the rat race of “rankings amongst schools”;
as a group with a highly evolved Emotional Quotient and what I call the “Diversity Quotient”, and not just focused on IQ;
as a group of committed educationists not afraid of looking at changed ways of thinking;
keeping the trust of every parent who looks up to your system for support and understanding in this frenzied world;
as a loving refuge that treats every child as precious and indispensable.

It would shatter her if she saw in you partiality, prejudices, an unwillingness to listen to a child’s point of view and a focus on commercial interest that sacrifices a child’s interest.

With this background of the Role you play in my child’s life, let me raise an issue seen in several schools today – a practice of “weeding out the underperformers starting from even the very lower classes.”

I have just a few questions for you to think about:


a) Have you made all efforts to put across the CONCEPT to the underperforming child? I know most schools do not have special coaching for the underperformer. You teach him using methods used for top-performers or interested children – how then can you expect him to respond favourably? Have you tried innovating methods to catch his attention and connect at his level of understanding?

b) Have you checked if the student-teacher relationship is not damaged or that the child is not suffering from any physical issue or emotional unrest ? If you thought his fit to be admitted to your school at one point of time, what did you do that made him unfit ?

Next, on your judgment methods - Let us say he gets the CONCEPT right – for example a Std. III student gets the concept that Multiplication is repeated Addition, but takes longer to do a Multiplication sum than his peers take, or has less accuracy in an Examination system and therefore ends up with lesser marks, well, what, pray tell me, is wrong with that ? Isn’t it sufficient that he has learnt the Concept and will in due course master its application as well. Why can’t he be allowed the slower pace that he is designed for at this stage of his life ? Tell me, if a child does not write his alphabet after a whole year of your effort when he is 5 years old, do you even reasonably think that he is not going to learn to write the alphabet in less than 24 hours when he is 8 years old. Then why rush him when he is not ready for the alphabet ? How does it help to detain him in the same class and make him go through the boredom of the same stuff for an entire year ? Tell me how the rest of the class is affected if a few in class are allowed to follow a different pace.

Infact, I believe that it does a world of good for my child to see children with different abilities being respected and treated as “mainstream”. It teaches her a huge lesson in the virtue of patience – just waiting till the ‘slow’ child is ready to catch up. It teaches her that she need not lose a friend because he can’t write the alphabet as quickly as she can.

Please give up this prejudice that a child who underperforms in Std. III is destined to be an under-performer throughout life. This writer is a classic example - from being an absolutely low marked student upto my Std. III, I ended up being one of the Class Toppers consistently thereafter. So let the child just pick up the concept through harder efforts on your part (oh, ask the parent to pay for those extra sessions or the added resource or time if you may – even that is a better option to playing around with a child’s morale ?), and stop focusing on the details that clutter the examination system.

Have you thought of creative, better solutions ? There are systems where a child is allowed to continue through his studies in all the passed subject while staying back only for the subject where he has failed. For eg- a child could move along with his peers to Std. IV in English, Science and Social Studies while continuing to study the unfinished concepts of Std. III.

Have you thought of methods by which the child is not branded a loser or made to drop out of the mainstream, lose his friends, be subjected to sarcasm at home or amongst the teachers – and yet go through the process of education in its finest sense ?

Oh, before the typical “adult-ish” cynical, self-righteous replies get instinctively formulated in your mind, please know that there certainly are ways to do this – and with all respect may I say, it is your business to find these ways. It just takes a teacher to teach a brilliant, interested student – but it takes a great teacher to teach an under-performing, disinterested child. What efforts are you making to build your pool of great teachers ?

I dread to think of the lesson in intolerance that my child picks up when she knows that “under-performers” are being asked to leave the school or being detained in the same class. I shudder thinking of the stress that these tender ones go through knowing that their performance is constantly being evaluated in a system that they had no say in making. Is it not unfair that schools you can think of evaluating the kids without opening themselves out to an evaluation process by the kids. Would you think of creating an open method by which a child and her parent can honestly tell you how some of your teachers really need to pull up their socks, watch their language and disciplining methods and shape up their own practices of fairness and impartiality ? When you don’t have the courage to do that, maybe you really should take Pink Floyd’s song seriously “We don’t need no education, We don’t need no thought control – no dark sarcasm in the classroom, Teachers leave the us kids alone”. Please understand that the child has some things to tell us – we must have the courage in us to listen. If a few of them are trying to tell us “Hey, you’re too fast for us”, let us find it in us to develop a system that carries them along at their pace.

Please don’t ask any child to leave your school branding him an “underperformer”. Because that makes YOU the “UNDERFORMER”! Let’s stop bullying our kids to conform to our system.