What's wrong with Schools Nowadays

There are few things that get me passionate enough to write a blog post about.  Well this is one of those few things.  So here goes.

I wish schools these days were more like the ones we used to go to.  Background.  Daughter goes to an expensive British school here.  Following the National Curriculum of UK.   Most of the teachers "in charge" come from UK with salaries miles higher than the local people.  Everything is copied from UK in general, including the calendar matched exactly to UK schools so that the British teachers in charge can go on holiday and meet their loved ones at the right times.  There is an undercurrent of resentment because of this perceived injustice among the local teachers as they almost always work harder and better than their British counterparts, atleast in my experience. 

Anyway, as Daughter has grown older, less and less marked work comes home.  Right now, my eight year old brings zero Maths marked work home.  Maths homework is given just once a week.  "Revision" work is regularly sent home just before assessments where the work of teaching NEW concepts is then happily passed on to the parents.  There are no text books of any sort where parents can refer to for concepts that they are supposed to teach during this "Revision" work.  The same library books are allocated every year to students of new classes.  Thus students don't own anything of academic value. Spelling tests are supposedly taken every week, but parents don't know how their child is doing as we never see the results.  Project work is regularly allocated (95% of which cannot be handled by 8 year olds alone, because there is so much time consuming, messy and arduous hard work involved of cutting, pasting, stapling and what not, not to mention shopping of raw materials).  Again parents never get to see the results.  How are our children being rewarded for this type of work?  No idea.

Another irritating thing.  Endless collection of money for charity or for the library or for games equipment by the school.  This is apart from the huge sums of money we spend on the school fees each term.  Recently Book Week was held in the school.  Virtually all the activities required more money to be spent.  Book mark competition, poster competition, everything required more money to enter.  Supposedly the school needs more money to buy library books in it's already well stocked library to which students regularly also are asked to donate their own books.

Some of the parents complained after Book Week.  So now, the school has shifted their focus of collecting money to field trips!  Ofcourse the normal school field trip to nearby areas of interest for kids don't lead to too much money being collected.  So now the school has thought of intense adventure focused trips in jungles and forests far away in "eco resorts".  Obviously the school has cooked up some deal with the resort.  We scratch your back, you scratch ours.  Huge sums of money are being extracted per child (eight year old child, mind you) for spending the whole day in these resorts with breakfast and lunch to supposedly justify these expenditures.  Ofcourse the parents have signed away all legal recourse should their poor children ever be bitten by some poisonous snake, spider, insect or just fall into the swamp or gets dragged away by some rogue crocodile for its next meal. Should one poor child's parents have any misgivings about sending their child to these trips then a huge guilt trip is laid on them and the child until consent is given.  This was what was done to Daughter.  Not only where we written to twice we were orally cajoled and threatened about the consequences of not sending her (each time in front of her).  Daughter was also interrogated about justifying our reasons for not sending her asking her on which field trip had she actually got a poisonous bite which got infected leading to a surgery under GA.  Ofcourse we had never said that she had incurred the bite on a field trip, just that she had suffered such and that we were nervous about sending her to such a wild environment where there are bound to be other poisonous insects and dangerous animals.

The parents of children in higher classes all resort to tutors.   I hear about how the syllabus has not been completed.  And then there are the constant resignations by the local teachers in the middle of the school year who feel aggrieved about their pittance of a salary and far too much work.  (Not academic, most of it, but things required for show, doing notice board displays, arranging field trips, filing reports and other administrative duties). 

I understand the school has it's commercial interests. However, right now it seems that's all they have.  Academics don't seem to be a concern in the least bit.  I wonder often if we are doing the right thing sending Daughter to such schools.  After all, how much do school drama productions, field trips and charitable endeavours, coupled with near zero learning help one earn a living in the future?