In the last two weeks, I have received seven requests from people I know to help them get their children into school.

Now, one would imagine that we are talking about the 10th grade board examinations or a place in a prestigious hostel. It is actually kindergarten and never have so many parents lived in such abject fear of being rejected. Which school can possibly have a yardstick to measure the worth of a four-year-old and then have the extreme arrogance of placing a merit list on the Internet announcing the ones who got in.

Heartbroken parents of those who failed to make it to this list are then forced to scurry around trying to use their contacts to get a chance of putting the child onto the first rung of the ladder.

It is unbelievable that the expat-oriented private sector with all its millionaires and all its high talking social gurus cannot create a situation where little children are not traumatized by rejection and there are enough vacancies to go round.

How can there possibly be a shortage of seats at this level? Part of it is possibly the parents themselves wanting to choose a well-known school or one that is conveniently located so the travel time is reduced. This one can understand but at the age of four in a KG class you really cannot have an Ivy League approach to things. The gap between the elitist KG class and the average KG class cannot be so wide or so dramatic that parents have to cringe and grovel to get their children in.

To add to the agony some of the schools have a lucky dip or a lottery or something in which some children “win” a seat because their number is drawn. To me this seems ghoulish in the extreme and a complete indictment of educationists who play this horrible game. This is an arrogance that defies logic and is a matter of great distress.

All last week and into the next few weeks this trial by fire will escalate. Just to make sure that things were really this bad I made a couple of personal visits to these “groves of baby academe” to see for myself why parents were weeping copiously and dashing about in frantic circles.

At the first school I was told that I couldn’t meet the principal because he was too busy and in any case he would not meet me because if he started meeting parents where would it end and I should meet the registrar, who, naturally, was not in his seat.

At the second school the guard could not stop laughing at the absurdity of my request to meet the headmaster or even the deputy headmaster or any of the KG faculty but I could take a form and fill it though really, he added, it was far too late.

When I was in school the headmaster wanted to meet your parents, it was incumbent upon him to do so…that was his job.

Now, in the past 26 years I have lived here I happened to be quite friendly and even more with many of the members of the school boards and the owners of these institutions. I also know several principals, current and former.

Having seen for myself the sheer madness that precedes the entry of a child into the lowest class possible, I implore these highly positioned men and women to come together and do something to resolve this issue.

I know how tiring it is for you to keep receiving calls asking you to please, please get so and so’s child an admission and that use of influence is also not the way to go because it is unfair on those who do not know the network.

From where I sit, the unfairness on the child is unacceptable. No one, however great an educationist, can sit in judgment on a four-year-old’s abilities and that should make any reasonable person sick to the stomach.