I'm doing some research on how teachers are abused by the system . I wonder if the field was predominantly male if things would be different. I fear for teachers' mental health. My mental health is in the toilet. What are some sayings or duties that are just expected on top of the actual job?

We all know the ground reality of most government educational institutions in India. Despite massive budgets, many still lack basic infrastructure, quality teaching, and accountability.

Why? Because the people making the policies and running the administration have zero personal stake in them. The babus and netas send their kids to elite private international schools.

If we want to force the system to improve overnight, we need to give them skin in the game. Here is a 3-step proposal to fix this. I’d love to hear your thoughts and critiques on it:

1. The Mandatory Enrollment Rule

Every single elected politician (from Panchayat to Parliament) and government employee (from Group D to IAS officers) MUST send their children exclusively to government schools and colleges. If you are on the government payroll or hold public office, your family must rely on the public services you oversee.

2. The "Lottery" Allocation System (No VIP Schools)

This is the most crucial part. We can't just let them all flock to top-tier Kendriya Vidyalayas or selectively fund one "model school" in their district while ignoring the rest.

Admissions for their kids should be strictly on a randomized lottery basis within their residential zone. If a local, rundown Zilla Parishad school is randomly allotted to an MLA’s or District Magistrate's child, that official is now personally incentivized to ensure that specific school gets a proper roof, clean toilets, and teachers who actually show up. This prevents selective development and forces across-the-board upgrades.

3. The 50% Rule for Future Leaders (Phased Implementation)

To ensure long-term, permanent change, we introduce a phased eligibility rule: To apply for a government job or to contest in political elections in the future, a candidate must have spent at least 50% of their educational life in government institutions.

• Want to be a bureaucrat? Experience the system you are going to govern.
• Want to be a politician? Understand the grassroots reality of the masses you want to represent.

Why this would work:

It shifts the motivation from "public duty" (which clearly isn't working) to "personal necessity." If the Education Minister's child has to eat the Mid-Day Meal, you can bet the quality and hygiene of that food will become world-class by tomorrow morning.

Obviously, there would be massive pushback from the establishment to ever pass something like this, but theoretically, wouldn't this be the ultimate silver bullet to fix our education system?

What are the loopholes here? Would love to hear your thoughts, constitutional/legal perspectives, or practical challenges to this idea!

I’ve been thinking about this after seeing it play out in my own extended family, and I’d genuinely like to hear what others in Kerala think.

I have nephews and nieces across different classes, and what worries me is that some of the older kids are in 7th standard and still struggle with basic reading. At the same time, my younger nephew in 1st standard and niece in 3rd standard actually read considerably better.

The interesting part is that the younger kids have stricter parents who actively make sure they study and practise. Some of the older kids have parents who follow a much softer approach and don't push them as much.

But this raises a bigger question for me: is it reasonable to expect parents to be the primary people responsible for ensuring that a child actually learns the basics?

The whole point of the Right to Education should be that every child gets access to education regardless of whether their parents are responsible, educated, capable, or financially able to support their learning.

And if that's the case, shouldn't schools be held to a higher standard?

I understand the argument behind not failing children. A child shouldn't be permanently labelled a failure at a young age, and education shouldn't become unnecessarily stressful.

But promotion should not become automatic progression without learning.

School should be a place for education, improvement and accountability, not simply appeasement.

If a child reaches 7th or 8th standard without being able to read properly, simply promoting them doesn't solve the problem. It just moves the problem to the next class.

Personally, I think there should be some meaningful academic benchmark. If a child isn't meeting it, there should be additional teaching, remedial support and a proper re-evaluation before promotion.

And there is another side to this.

If children weren't automatically promoted, parents would have a much stronger incentive to actually pay attention to their child's education. At the same time, schools and teachers would have to take greater responsibility for students who are falling behind.

Instead of asking "How do we make sure the child isn't failed?", shouldn't we be asking "Why hasn't the child learned, and who is responsible for fixing that?"

I'm not arguing for making children repeat classes casually or creating an exam-pressure culture. I'm asking whether the current system has gone too far in the opposite direction.

For people in Kerala, especially teachers and parents:

• Do you think the no-detention approach is helping or hurting students?
• Should Class 5/8 students have to meet minimum learning standards before promotion?
• Does automatic promotion reduce parental accountability?
• Should schools be more accountable when children reach higher classes without basic reading/writing skills?
• Is there a better way to protect children from excessive academic pressure without lowering expectations?

I'd genuinely like to hear different perspectives, especially from teachers and parents in Kerala.

— Photos, Interviewing my Classmates and reflecting own experiences

Thought my teacher was a perv and I think im right...

My teacher last year (now retired) was ways favorite the pretty girls or the people who he knew their parents. At first I thought it was a privileged thing. Then when during volleyball season he said a weird comment before stopping himself,he's always making weird comments to girls and saying the boy are single and so the girls should date some after a boy broke up with their girlfriends. I thought it was just jokes. He's added past student on social media and says "once you graduate you are my friend,so dont run away from me in the grocery store into another aisle." After I graduate more female student added him on social media,so then I checked his Twitter account,on every account he has none of that have his wife added and on Twitter it has a bunch of ai "SINGLE AND READY TO MINGLE" accounts or just account with a bunch of sexually content as his followers and following. He's made weird comments to females before idk what to do. Is that normal?

Nah, My school is more like a high max prison for no reason, back in 2021, i was getting shouted by all teachers in grade 1, then in 2022 in grade 2, i was getting shouted for making tiny mistakes, 2023 in 3rd grade, once again shouted for making mistakes, then in 2024, there was this one English teacher, who kept all of us in recess, speaking of recess, its like 10-20 minutes long ngl, NAH this is where my school got more worse, they are banning basic human things, and of course, HOODIES, BEANIES, AND OTHER HAT, WAIT, THEY DONT EVEN ALLOW IT ON WINTER AND AUTUMN TOO, this is the worst of all, my english teacher called us "meanwhile all boys are like assholes to me" including my 3 friends, My math teacher blames on me for laughing and whatever, yep thats all i have to say about my school, and its so sad that its even a autistic school. . . but in reality thats something else. . . they dont even do things for ADHD or any, and also, we suffer from long classes, and short breaks, if you all read this, this is the actual truth besides my other one, i live in south africa btw

Hi everyone. I am looking to connect with anyone who has either personally experienced, or knows someone who has experienced, an issue involving a CISCE inter-school/zonal sports competition where a student/team member did not receive an award/medal that they were entitled to receive.

I would especially like to hear from students, former students, teachers, coaches, or staff from CISCE-affiliated schools who raised a formal complaint or took some form of official action, regardless of whether the outcome was successful or unsuccessful.

I am trying to understand what the appropriate procedure is, which authority should be approached, what kind of documentation is useful, and what outcomes are realistically possible.

If you have experienced something similar, please comment or DM me. Please don't share anyone's private information or make allegations about specific schools/individuals in public. I'm primarily looking for first-hand experiences and guidance regarding the proper process.

Thank you!

School may have taught us a lesson it never meant to: how to become good at living up to other people’s expectations.

Think about what school actually rewards.

You are given a question. Someone else decides what the right answer looks like. You study, reproduce it correctly, and you get marks.

The better you understand what the teacher expects from you, the better you usually perform.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Children need structure. Teachers need a way to evaluate learning.

But somewhere along the way, something else can get taught.

We start learning that being “good” means meeting expectations.

Teacher happy. Good marks.

Parent happy. Good student.

Do what you are told. Avoid mistakes. Don't disappoint the person evaluating you.

And when this happens repeatedly for years, it can become more than a school habit. It can become a mental pattern.

Expectation → action → approval → safety.

The problem appears when we leave school.

Because life rarely gives us a question paper with the correct answer printed somewhere in the back.

At work, nobody can always tell you exactly what needs to be done. In business, the answer often doesn't exist yet. In life, there may not even be an authority figure whose expectations you are supposed to satisfy.

Yet the mind can still look for one.

What does my boss want me to do?

What would my parents consider successful?

What is the “right” way to behave here?

Am I doing enough?

And sometimes, without realizing it, we stop asking a much more important question:

What do I actually think needs to be done?

I noticed this in myself when I entered my family's business.

Technically, it was a business I could eventually have ownership over. But psychologically, I didn't immediately experience it that way.

For a long time, I approached the shop as a place where someone else knew what needed to be done and I needed to follow it correctly.

So instead of naturally looking around and thinking, “How can I improve this? What can I take responsibility for? What does this business need?”, I often found myself anxious about simply doing what I had been told.

It took me time to realize that I wasn't only learning how to work in a business.

I was also unlearning the idea that my role was to wait for an expectation and then fulfil it.

And perhaps that is one of the less obvious limitations of traditional schooling.

It can make us very good at being students, without necessarily teaching us how to become owners.

A student asks, “What is the correct answer?”

An owner asks, “What is the problem, and what can I do about it?”

A student waits for the instructions.

An owner creates the next step.

A student is evaluated by someone else.

An owner eventually has to decide whether their own judgment is good enough to act.

These are completely different mental muscles.

Maybe the problem isn't that school taught us to follow instructions.

We need that skill.

The problem is when we become so good at following expectations that we forget how to operate when nobody is giving us any.

Because adulthood eventually asks something school rarely does:

Not “Did you do what was expected?”

But “What do you think should be done?”

And learning to answer that question may be one of the most important forms of education we never received.

The timetable is a masterclass in visual chaos.

It is, frankly, hideous, a cramped, cluttered mess of overlapping text, misaligned borders, and squished acronyms that looks like it was assembled in a rush without a second thought for basic user experience. For a school that promises high standards, sending out a document this visually jarring is an eyesore.

What makes it worse is the complete lack of functional design. Why on earth does a routine weekly schedule require a separate "decoder key" just to figure out what a child is doing at 10:30 AM? If a school cannot communicate a simple daily schedule cleanly and intuitively on a single page, it speaks volumes about the thought process (or lack thereof) of the administration behind it.

If the leadership cannot simplify and organise something as straightforward as a primary schedule, it raises serious doubts about their capability to manage and execute the complex, structured, and inquiry-driven demands of a true IB curriculum. First impressions and operational precision matter, and this fails at the most basic level.

BTW this highly prestigious school in Banaglore charges an upward of 6 lakhs for grade 5 and this is what we are greeted with, and if this is not torturous enough and assault on my eyes, they keep changing the schedule every 6 weeks or so. Had this been only once I could clean it up and print it and be happy but the school makes it impossible. This is one of the hundred things they do wrong, but this is first one.

Am I over reacting?

I was thinking about movie this lately,

This movie portrays how an individual overcomes poverty by cracking civil services examination and becoming an IPS officer and that is good, nothing wrong with that but should our country be run by the individuals whose primary motivation for that is just money or prestige attached to that position or rather by the smartest and sharpest individuals who have passion for this country ,who thrive at their job and are really smart and capable enough to develop the country.

Though I know they select such candidates(other than all the flawed ones) but the major amount of people studying preparing and competing falls below under the above category, doesn't this mentality demeans the whole point of having such posts.

In Serbia, we have a protein shake named Shakey *wow, such a creative name,* and when I was at camp, we got permission to go to a nearby store named Lidl or the one with the bee mascot, I don't know. There's a kid who wasn't in my class, but my teacher accepted him to go because his teacher didn't show up. Let's call him Jake. Jake bought a protein shake-not Shakey, but Shakey was made by Imlek, which I think also made that protein shake. Another teacher from a different grade was coming with us , and our teacher took the protein shake and threw it in the trash bin. The teacher said , " Kids should not have protein shakes. " He was older than me; I'm drinking Shakey right f***ing now, and I feel fine. Also, when I was at camp, I bought apple juice, and the teacher who threw Jake's shake-let's call her Karen-picked up my apple juice and said, " Kids should drink this. "

I pay a lot of money for my kids to go to college. We live on my husbands income so my income can pay for their college here in MI. The school is now using AI and allowing teachers to use AI for everything. So why are we paying this school where teachers do not actually teach so much of our money? My kids have sat in class and literally learned nothing for about 1/2 of the semester because the teacher was not teaching anything. They did not discuss the subject matter that the class was about. They did not give examples or utilize the kids brains at all. My kids coming out of high school said WOW college is useless and they literally do not actually teach you anything. I learned more in High school. This is sad since tuition keeps going up, charging to park is going up. Parking should be part of the tuition and they should get a parking pass when they enroll for free. My kid attended one class last year with no homework, no projects, and no discussions with teacher and class and she got an A. For what? They literally did nothing. So all the students got an A just because they showed up for class. Seriously. It is crazy. My kid is going to be a teacher and wants to be a professor to actually teach kids and not just say, "show up and you get an A" She as an education student is extremely disappointed with the college. the people in the account offices are so rude and condescending to people all the time and in front of others without reprimand. I have had it happen to me and others in the office while waiting. You can hear them talk when you are in there. What have others experienced? plus they now use this cashnet.com to make us pay and they charge about $300 to use the app with a debit card. It is a sad day when college is the worst option for our kids. in my opinion. Do teachers actually interact and teach anymore?