Knot comfortable

A handful of Mumbai schools have made a very student-friendly decision: they have thrown out the painfully uncomfortable tie and thick shirts/pinafores from students’ cupboards, opting for T-shirts/loose cotton shirts and soft denims. At last, the authorities have woken up to the fact that India is a tropical country and it makes no sense to carry on with the temperate-conditioned British style of getting children starched and tied up. Going to school must begin with a comfortable feeling, as that will translate into an enthusiasm to soak in the already punishing curriculum.
This long overdue action is a great lesson for other schools in the country to emulate. Imagine LKG children, who have to grapple with starched shirts buttoned up till the neck to hold the readymade, knotted tie that is clipped at the back. This only adds to their discomfort as they are already crying, being thrown into this ocean of strange women who are not their mothers, and children who are not their siblings or playmates.
This takes me on a flashback to my play-schooled daughter’s first step in a “regular” school: She was drowned in her thick dark blue skirt, a white shirt buttoned till the neck, and a tie. All these in Chennai’s June. She hated wearing the tie, and threw a fit. I then sent her without the tie for almost a week. But the school minders would ask me to make her wear the tie. She hated her school and so did I. Then I stitched her tie to her shirt so that it was not “tied” to her neck. Still, it was such a pathetic sight to see her and other children howling, more due to discomfort. Why couldn’t these schools shake off this colonial fossil?
Thankfully, my daughter got into another school after her brief stint there. The school, of course, was good in all respects. But when my daughter wore the uniform of her new school, the first thing she said was: “I like this school. This has no tie”.
I do subscribe to uniforms in school. It is the greatest leveler. But schools have to budge from their starched attitude, and make way for brighter and easier clothes for children. In fact, these same schools indoctrinate children in their geography lessons on the types of clothes people choose to wear in different parts of the world according to their climatic conditions. Then why make these children sit through these classes in weather-unfriendly clothes.
It is mandatory for girls in conservative schools to wear salwar-kameez. At least they make no bones about their conservatism. But even a number of mainstream schools are making the girls wear salwar-kameez-dupatta from class seven. These schools argue that “grown up” girls need to cover themselves up, specially because they are studying with boys. How much skin would a knee-length skirt show? Or is a dupatta pinned to the shoulders enough to conceal the girl’s frame. Would a loose shirt or T-shirt not suffice? By bringing in this dupatta culture, the school authorities are only instilling gender consciousness, which is not healthy in a co-educational set-up. This will only make the girls more aware of their femininity and the boys more curious about their unnecesarily covered-up classmates.