How do you measure the success of a school?

In an age where teachers are expected only to relay information from the text books to the students, how do you measure the success of a well oiled school? Is it by the number of students who have cleared the board exams each year? Or by the number of students who have graduated to become doctors, engineers, businessmen or landed themselves in top positions in the country’s administrative forces? Or should it really be gauged by the number of happy students it graduates every year?

Year after year students are made to go through the same set of books and made to do the same set of experiments in the laboratories. They tend to have a different kind influence on different children. But how is the schooling now contributing to the overall development of a child?

Is there an hour during the school hours when the children are left to sit with the teachers and peers and discuss topics that interest them? Maybe just talk about random topics like family, robots, spaceships, friendship and so on…

Do all the schools really have career guidance counsellors who will spend time regularly with the children and not just have a one hour career counselling discourse in the school? Introducing all kinds of working and non-working parents to children over a course of few years maybe as early as grade 3 will make them see life differently as opposed to how the children in grade 8-10 see life.

Rather than having children study all their school life and have children graduate with good grades but without a clue as to what they want to be in life, is it better to have children who are happy all the while and help them choose from the vast areas of career options that are now available? Can we not tell them that painting, dancing, singing, writing; all those treated as hobbies can be made into careers? Is it not important to tell them that jobs are not just about money and that they will be spending the rest of their lives in doing something that they should love doing?

Are we, after seeing a fast paced life like ours, always hurrying the children to school, hurrying to office, picking up kids from after school classes, hurrying to bed, still teaching the kids to go after a job that pays them well? Where, in between are we stopping to pause life as it is and see the niceties that we fail to notice? Let the fall go by, let the rain come down.

Let us tone down the competitive world a little bit and tell the children there is always place for one more good person regardless of what career option they choose.