Irresponsible Parenting & An Expensive Miseducation

By Rambles

As a child, he had a beautiful relationship with God. He loved spending time chatting with Him. He had decided that when he grew up, he would travel to distant lands telling people about God. He had read story books about prophets and saints and wanted to follow in their footsteps.

He was not yet ten years of age when his parents decided to send him off to a boarding school, which was located more than a thousand miles from their home. They didn’t seek his opinion in this matter, and although he was loathe to go, he couldn’t refuse. In their family, children were expected to do just as their parents insisted. It was simply inconceivable that they should question them.

His parents were of the ‘West is best’ school of thought. Even though they would never have admitted it, they believed that ‘progress’ —and, indeed, the very purpose of life itself — lay simply in becoming as Westernised as possible, in every sphere of life—in language, food, literary habits, musical tastes, dress, hobbies, likes and dislikes, and even thought patterns. The only limit to this process was the colour of their skin—although they might have tried transforming that too if the technology was then available.

In line with their thinking, they decided that an English-style boarding school education was the best thing for their son. The school that they decided for him was supposedly modeled on the lines of Eaton and Harrow (which they believed were the best schools in the world), and was said to ‘produce’ young men who would go on to become what were called ‘big-achievers’ and ‘great success stories’. A major factor for their deciding on this school was that it was one of the most expensive available. Being so costly, they thought (in line with the logic that the more expensive a thing, the better it is) that it must really be the best.

And so, the little boy was packed off to the boarding school, completely against his will. But how he hated it, from the very first day! He had never been away from home before, and he felt completely devastated. The ragging, which was pervasive and an everyday thing, was unimaginably horrific, involving even physical and psychological abuse of junior students. Sexual experimentation and aberration were common. Being a soft and reserved child, he was a particular target of bullies and toughies. Very soon, he was driven to such misery that he began to pine for his life to end at once.

From almost as early in life as he could remember, he loved chatting with God. He would pray before and after meals and would exchange words with God before going to bed and after getting up in the morning. He could spend hours reading spiritual books specially designed for children of his age. But in the school, not a single boy did any such things. In fact, not once did he hear anyone even mention the word ‘God’. Using abusive language was considered the macho thing to do. Conversations centred on things like sports, sex, films, cars, fun, music and food. Not surprisingly, very soon, he began to flow with the tide and his prayer life and his regular chatting with God came to an end.

Meanwhile, his parents, who had sub-let their responsibility of grooming their child to an institution that they knew almost nothing about but which they thought was the best for him, were completely unaware (perhaps deliberately so) of what was happening with and to him. How they loved bragging to their friends (who weren’t as wealthy as they were to be able to afford such an expensive schooling for their children) about how their little son was supposedly faring! “Oh, our little one is doing great!” they would gush. “He recently went on a school trip up in the mountains and had a whale of a time! This semester, he’s learning horse-riding and ice-skating, and next semester, he may start sculpture and the piano. The school’s so good, they keep the students really busy doing all sorts of interesting things all day!”

*

If his parents had intended that the boarding school would make him the person they dreamt he would one day become, they proved completely wrong. He didn’t go on to become ‘rich and famous’ as they had expected. Moreover, packing him off to the school at a tender age against his will and not caring for how he was faring there gravely damaged their relations with him. For decades, he just wasn’t able to get himself to forgive them for what they had forced him to undergo, and the fact that they never acknowledged their wrongdoing (leave alone asking forgiveness for it) disgusted him the more. He simply could not understand how his parents, who were supposedly ‘well-educated’ and who prided themselves in being ‘very modern’, could be so cruel as to send off their little son to a distant place, where he had to face unimaginably brutal ragging on a daily basis: he couldn’t imagine any good-hearted parent ever doing anything like that. To add insult to injury, not once in all the years that he was in the school did his parents ever ask him what he was going through: it seemed to him that they just didn’t care. And the worst thing of all—this was something that really pained him—the supposedly ‘best’ schooling that they had compelled him to go through had completely miseducated him out of his faith in God. By the time he had finished school, not a single vestige of the great relationship that he had enjoyed with God as a little child survived, so effective had the schooling been in brainwashing him into the crass hedonism that was its underlying ideology, an ideology that his parents shared.

*

Later in life, when his parents had passed away and when he had become mature enough to forgive them for what they had done in shunting him off to the boarding school when he was still a child (he felt that although they had been gravely mistaken, they might have intended well for him), his mind would often travel back to those years. He would spend long hours reflecting on the terrible damage of the miseducation he had been forced to go through and the irresponsible parenting that he had been subjected to and would think of things he could do so that others could be saved from undergoing the same trauma.