Hyderabad: Private schools continue to fleece parents

Hyderabad: Taking the parents once again for a ride, several schools have been tossing in big technical terms to impress upon the gullible parents and promising that their wards who would go through such teaching methodology would pick up what is called as multiple intelligence.

Speaking to The Hans India, V Srinivas Rao, an IT professional said, "Several things the schools talk and promise at the time of admission is to deliver high-end education to the child just to justify a fee of Rs 1 lakh or even more."

Take for example, a corporate school in Secunderabad, founded by the winner of Presidential Teachers' Award, offers a wide array of 27 extracurricular activities and 12 sporting areas for children. It rolls out dazzling statistics to impress upon the parents and claims that it adopts an international standard like availability of square foot per child, maintains the teacher-people ratio of 1:16, has spacious libraries with a specific number of books per child etc.

Another school, located in Begumpet, goes a step further and claims that its faculty has an edge over how to integrate different learning systems like Blooms and Marzano's Taxonomy.

N Radhika, a mother with a post-graduate degree in engineering, said, "I went to admit my son in Class VII. But, what they said about how they teach had surprised me. I really could not understand and felt helpless and woke up at the end when they quoted the fee."

However, when she did her own research, she found out that the learning systems were related to the learning process and knowledge utilisation. "But now, my son is in Class VIII. When I look back, what they had promised does not tally with much of the learning system that they talked about," she added. As if that was not all enough, several corporate schools promise to train and equip children with multiple intelligence for their holistic development. Perumal Swamy, a senior consultant in Business Intelligence and Analytics in an IT company said, "We do study a bit of psychology in our business studies and analysis. The school tosses in the model of intelligence proposed by a Harvard Psychologist Howard Garner. Based on that, people have not one, but many kinds of intelligence which includes spatial, visual, linguistic, musical and others. Many parents get an impression that once they pay the fee quoted by the school, they would in turn make their child gain, if not all, at least some of those bits of intelligence."

He felt that the State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT), National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) or education departments to come up with some parental guidelines. Otherwise, the private corporate and elite schools would continue to fleece the parents in the name of offering what they call it as high-end education.