I want to tell you something about Hindi.
I grew up in a boys' school in Bangalore. In most subjects, including Maths, Science, and English, I held my own. In grades ten and twelve, I scored 90+ in almost everything.
But in Hindi, I scored exactly 66. Both times.
Same number. Grade ten. Grade twelve. As if it was “branded” on me.
It pulled my average to 84%. I lost my state rank because of one subject.
For years, I carried a verdict about myself. Hindi wasn't for me. The number had spoken.
What I found out, decades later, sitting at home with my son Hrriday, is that there's a simple rule for the confusion I had with choti i ki matra and badi i ki matra. One rule. He explained it in 2 minutes. He had never found it difficult.
I had never been taught that rule. Not once. In 6 years of Hindi education.
My grade six teacher, Mr Sanualla, was a brilliant man. He just wasn't looking for the gap. When I made the mistake, he punished me for it. When you're 12 and punished rather than corrected, something closes in your head. You stop trying to understand. You start trying to hide.
That's what the 66 was measuring. Not my relationship with Hindi. I still love Hindi poetry. I still go to kavi sammelans. I read it for pleasure.
The 66 measured one foundational gap, compounded by years of shame, never caught by an institution too busy moving forward to look back.
The number became the official account. The family had no standing to say otherwise.
This is how the demotion happens.
It happens gradually and reasonably. In response to a system that appears to know more than you do.
The industrial school wasn't designed to diminish the family's authority. It was designed to do something genuinely good: give children access to learning that their families, in the 19th century, couldn't provide alone. It worked, in the terms it was designed for.
But it came with a consequence nobody planned for. The school became the place where a child's future was decided. The family became the support function for someone else's system.
Three moments in which that demotion was completed. One question each.
1. The number became the only truth.
When the report card arrived, the family lost its authority to define what progress meant.
Think about what a report card actually measures. Performance on the curriculum the school chose, at the pace the school set, was assessed on the day the school scheduled. A child who loves something but missed one foundational lesson will score badly. A child who is anxious but well-drilled will score well. The number captures neither reality.
I wrote about a child who left 21K School last year because we couldn't give her what she needed. She went and built it anyway. (Read it here)
What does your child's report card not say about them that you know to be true? Name it. That knowledge belongs to you.
2. India never wrote its own script.
The school system most Indian families are using wasn't designed for Indian families. It was inherited, almost unchanged, from the British Raj. We gained independence in 1947. We kept the school.
Gandhi had a different vision. He called it Nai Talim: education rooted in vocational learning, in village life, in a child's actual context. He believed knowledge and work shouldn't be separated. He didn't live to build it.
What we built instead was the same factory handed to us. For nearly 8 decades, every National Education Policy has said the same things: pedagogy matters, the child matters, skills matter. The classroom has looked almost identical from one generation to the next.
If you were designing your child's education from scratch, no constraints, no existing system, what would the first year look like?
3. The noise replaced the instinct.
This is the present-day version. And it's the most insidious.
Parents today aren't disengaged. They're overwhelmed. Every week, there's a new study, a new framework, a new reel about what children need. Whether they're reading enough. Whether screens are the problem.
I see it in the parents who attend our webinars. The question is no longer does online school work. It's: I sense something is wrong for my child, but I can't trust my own instinct anymore.
That paralysis is the demotion in its final form. The parent who knows something but can't find a credible anchor for what they know.
Even I'm not immune. Hrriday has been feeling behind classmates who use AI to get answers faster. I've been restricting his access. I sit with genuine uncertainty about whether I'm protecting something important or falling behind a system moving faster than my instincts.
When was the last time you made a decision about your child's learning that was entirely yours? Not from what the school required, not from something you read online. What was it?
The family didn't fail to show up.
It was gradually pushed to the margins. And most families went along, because the system seemed to know what it was doing.
Here's what I've come to understand after 25 years inside education.
Parents are the key players in a child's success. What lies between the child and the system is always the parent. The warmth, the confidence, the self-esteem, the trust: that comes from the family, and from nowhere else.
The school can return a mark. Only the family can return a child to themselves.
With love and joy,
Yeshwaanth
Founder and CEO, 21K School
P.S. Reply to this email. Tell me about a number that missed the point about your child. I read every one.
The report card spoke. But you were always the better witness.
