A school primarily aims at producing (the term is jarring, more akin to an automated factory!) well balanced, well rounded personalities who can make a difference to their world as adults. ‘Education’ is too broad, an all inclusive, encompassing umbrella word that can’t possibly be fettered within the confines of the four walls of a classroom. Early on as a young public school teacher, while watching staff and students play together, I invariably found it much easier for the wicketkeeper to communicate with his slip cordon while on the pitch. Classroom was a different story. Unfortunately, today’s schooling is stifled with conformity, peripheral learning and mediocrity, where assessment is more often than not flawed and evaluation, staid and monotonous. Schooling cannot flourish with archaic practices, few of them redundant, some even decadent. It has to evolve with the changing clime and challenges. While the CCE may be a laudable initiative by the CBSE, it’ll take years for it to sediment, and that too if we work towards its effective implementation and execution. In most schools, if not all, it is a routine, mundane chore, more to do with paper work and furnishing evidence rather than anything else, an art that we seem to have mastered with élan and pride. Education, like life itself, is hard to structure and therefore it is only natural that flexible environments be created to maximize the learning experience. An exclusive boys school or a girls school is in stark contrast to what the real world is and therefore doesn’t offer a real life experience to children studying in such schools. Education has to engender real life experiences which help sustain an individual and enable him to carve an identity of his own in the real word with myriad experiences and different people having varying interests, inclinations, beliefs, attitudes and upbringing.