No regimented seating in classrooms.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images
Had you walked into a lecture hall in any medical college in the early 2000s or earlier, you would see male students on one side and women on the other. The gender norms were rarely flouted in the classroom. That generation — my generation — feared the professors. Scared that they might think bad about us and our “wayward” priorities, and most important, fail us.
Somewhere along the line, while I was busy getting older and settling down, it all changed. Changed for good, I believe.
Walking into a class in the role of a teacher now, it still catches me off-guard sometimes when I see the mixed classroom mixed in every way. Everywhere, on every bench sit men flanked by women or the other way round. The centuries-old Indian tradition of separation between genders is changing, and the rulebook is being rewritten with shiny new dictums.
As anything in medical literature these days, the question needs to be asked — can it be a post-COVID phenomenon? The schools were all online during the lockdown. And when the bans were lifted, the children came together with such force that the old gender laws of classroom etiquette became obsolete.
Unlikely, right?
The more obvious reason seems to be the popularity of social media and the resulting smaller world, bigger ideas, and broader mindsets. Not that all this probably started as a silent revolution by some unknown heroic person in an obscure classroom of an absent-minded teacher, who did not mind a disruption to the seating arrangements.
To the question of why this is such an important milestone in societal gender laws, I have an answer. We still live in a world where stalking is romance, rejection leads to murder, and honour killings is just another news. Our children need to learn normal societal interaction with other genders. They need to learn the difference between stalking and romance. They should have relationships that build them up, and they also need to learn that such relationships can be friendships too. They must fall in love, brave rejections, and accept failures. And we, as the older generation, are obligated to provide them such an environment. But instead, our culture discourages the boy and the girl from engaging with each other in their childhood days and come adulthood, forces an engagement on them and expects them to live a happily married life with children and the picket fence.
Mixed seating arrangements in a classroom are but a start to normalising friendships across genders, a start to normalising love affairs and love failures, and a start to a generation with healthier relationships than us. This is, of course, not without resistance.
There are teachers who declare that this mixing of boys and girls disrupts the classroom. They claim that such seating arrangements put something other than studies in the minds of the students. They attribute every failure in exams to the mismanaged mixed classrooms. But there is no conclusive evidence for this, and they, at least to me, seem like the ravings of a rusted mind resistant to change. And time shall prove that our new generation is walking the right path.
To conclude, whenever I see a properly mixed classroom, unabashed friends of different genders on a motorbike, students who wave their hand to a professor in greeting instead of the deep bow that to some signifies respect, a class that forgets to stand up when a teacher enters, I smell change, that harbinger of progress. If all this seems a far cry from the Indian culture that you grew up with, let me close by reminding you that no culture inimical to change has survived the march of time.
Published – April 13, 2025 03:19 am IST