Privilege and its changing relationship with respect to education is something Dev Lahiri knows all too well. Having worked as a teacher and a headmaster at some of India’s most sought-after boarding schools, Lahiri, as he says in his memoir, has had a lot of time to “reflect a great deal” on the various factors that influence the policies of these schools and whether they are being held back by certain sections who attempt to interfere with their administration.

In With a Little Help From My Friends: A Schoolmaster’s Memoirs, Lahiri – himself the son of an Army officer, as privileged a background as any – has a tendency to nostalgically remember his own schooling while presenting a frank and grim view of the issues faced by students at private boarding schools today. The contrasts between the stories narrated by Lahiri the nostalgic student and Lahiri the reality-bitten educator gives readers a worrying picture of how the definition of education at these schools is being changed to the detriment of faculty and the students at these institutions.

Profit motive

And the general change in the primary perception of education is a major motive, as Lahiri himself remarks while talking about his life as a boarding school student: “Parents had not yet started seeing education as a consumer product. ‘I am paying and therefore I am entitled’ was not the prevalent attitude.” According to him, the demands placed on the faculty by parents and the boards of these institutions to produce ever-higher academic, athletic and extra-curricular excellence has led to schools placing less emphasis on values such as empathy and the contributions of students to society.

But Lahiri revels in narrating incidents that show him working in tandem with faculty bodies and generations of students rising up to the occasion to deal with issues that threatened to destroy the internal cohesion of the schools he taught or headed. Whether describing the conflicts due to senior-junior bullying or the troubles faced due to strikes organised by labour unions, Lahiri takes pride in talking about students and staff going out of their way to ensure the smooth functioning of the school as well as repairing and building relationships between all groups the who make it a whole.

Old boys’ ways

But no book which talks about India’s boarding schools is complete without discussing the school administration’s relationship with its alumni networks. And the longest chapters in Lahiri’s memoirs are devoted to talking about his relationship and conflicts with these networks and the members of the boards of these school. Some of the most evocative passages in the book show the headmaster not only dealing with openly hostile alumni and school boards, but also fighting medical complications that routinely threatened his very life. And he does not pull any punches while describing the extent to which these groups would go to exact their pound of flesh from him. In his own words:

“I was involved in a very serious accident that occurred, coincidentally, right next to the school [Welham Boys’ School]. As I was bleeding profusely and in a state of shock Indrani [Lahiri’s wife] rushed me for medical attention to the closest possible source of help, which, as it happened, was Welham Boys’. To our horror the guard at the gate politely folded his hands and begged us not to embarrass him as he had strict orders not to let us enter.”

In another previous, long-lasting incident, a section of the alumni from Lawrence School, Lovedale, began a campaign dubbed Operation Fireball, where Lahiri was eventually accused of “misappropriation of funds, manhandling little children, including girls, being against the Bharatiya Janata Party…and making anti-BJP statements”. The catalyst for Operation Fireball? An accusation that the headmaster was “destroying the glorious traditions of the school” by inviting a debate on whether to devote less time to Founders’ Day parade preparations so that students could study for their board examinations. Fireball also targeted Lahiri’s family, with him noting that its effects on his daughters persisted long after he and his family left Lovedale.

But while accepted privilege is a way of life known to most boarding school students, the fact that a section of parents, members of school boards and alumni use that acceptance to dictate how the school should run itself worries Lahiri greatly. And this thought comes through when he ponders over the need for school traditions in contemporary times. When told in a letter that Lawrence School’s Founders’ Day parade “teaches above all the manly qualities of ‘steadiness’ which immediately differentiates a boy who has done drill from a lounging Delhi school product”, Lahiri asks himself:

“If these were the ‘manly’ qualities that Lawrencians had imbibed from the parade, I wondered whether schools were better off with ‘lounging’ products who were at least morally upright?”

Educating the public school

Beyond his own personal experiences, though, Lahiri takes time to reflect on why public schools “will have to seriously reinvent themselves” if they want to remain relevant. And the reasons for reinventing themselves are many. Senior-junior relationships can create a “climate of fear that stifles creativity and growth”. Public schools also “continue to live in a world dominated by the old boys mafia” that does not allow the kind of “professionalism” contemporary education requires. But the biggest change, he says, will have to come in the form a change in the relationship between the school and the parents of students:

“One of the biggest impediments to the progress of our educational system is the lack of cooperation and partnership between parent and school…Too often parents see their role vis-à-vis the school as one of ‘them ‘and ‘us’. The truth remains that for educational institutions to be successful a genuine partnership must be forged between the school and the parent…This symbiotic relationship must not be lost in the clamour generated by petty issues…We just cannot move forward in our educational endeavours unless parents and schools learn to trust each other. A token PTA is not the answer.”

Lahiri’s book, then, finds itself published during a time when schools have begun to ideologically reposition themselves as institutions where education can be bought and sold. A near-constant rise in administrative fees and costs, the lack of a reliable public education system and benchmarking of school performance on the basis of board examination results and college placements has led to a system where both the parents and the schools can profit from educating students, as opposed to exposing them to a holistic view of the world. Lahiri’s memoirs, then, must not only be read as the autobiography of a former educator and headmaster, but also as a narrative about India’s most elite boarding schools and the constant conflict between parents’ demands for excellence and their own traditions, ethos and administration.

With A Little Help From My Friends: A Schoolmaster’s Memoirs, Dev Lahiri, Rupa.