A school principal in Gurgaon recently made an observation that deserves attention. Parents today, she noted, increasingly expect “customer service” from schools. On the surface, this sounds like a familiar complaint from within the education system. A remark that gets nodded at and forgotten. However, taken seriously, it points to something more unsettling: a quiet yet significant transformation in how schooling itself is being understood and valued.
Two powerful forces are converging in urban India. The first is the growing commercialisation of education. The second is the sharply rising anxiety of parents. Together, they are steadily recasting schools from institutions of learning into service providers. And in that transition, both teachers and parents find themselves inhabiting roles they did not quite choose. The language of “customer service” did not emerge from nowhere. Over the past two decades, private schooling has expanded dramatically across Indian cities. Fees have climbed steeply. English-medium and “globally oriented” schools have become markers of aspiration and social standing. For many middle-class families, education is no longer understood primarily as intellectual or moral development; it is an investment, a high-stakes wager on a child’s economic future and social mobility.
Once education is viewed through this lens, the expectations it generates shift accordingly. School fees stop being expenses and become investments demanding returns. Dissatisfaction stops being a concern and hardens into a consumer grievance. Parents begin expecting what they would from any paid service: responsiveness, customisation, measurable outcomes, perhaps even guarantees. Never mind that learning is inherently slow, unpredictable, and resistant to standardisation. The market logic, once internalised, is difficult to set aside. And schools, caught between genuine educational purpose and commercial pressure, increasingly struggle to resist it.
However, it would be reductive and unfair to attribute this entirely to entitlement. The principal’s more perceptive observation lies elsewhere: parents today are genuinely, deeply anxious. And that anxiety, given the landscape they are navigating, is not without justification. India’s education system sits within a brutally competitive structure. High-stakes examinations remain narrow gateways to opportunity. Degrees have multiplied, but meaningful employment has not kept pace, producing what economists term “credential inflation”, where qualifications lose value even as the effort to obtain them intensifies. Meanwhile, social media has transformed parenting into a relentlessly comparative exercise, where benchmarks are always visible and rarely attainable. In such a climate, the pressure on families is not imagined; it is structural, persistent, and largely beyond individual control.
Parental involvement, in this context, changes in character entirely. It is no longer simply about nurturing a child’s development. It becomes about managing risk, minimising uncertainty, and securing advantage wherever possible. Every grade, every teacher remark, every classroom dynamic is freighted with disproportionate significance. Schools become the primary sites where these anxieties are expressed, negotiated, and sometimes fiercely contested, often without the frameworks or mutual understanding needed to resolve them constructively.
This places teachers in an extraordinarily difficult position. There is, as the principal notes, a thin line between reasonable accountability and relentless scrutiny. That line is becoming harder to walk with each passing year. When feedback must be carefully worded to pre-empt complaints, its honesty is compromised. When every pedagogic decision is potentially contestable, caution displaces creativity and experimentation. The classroom begins operating on defensive logic rather than an educational purpose.
What erodes through all of this is trust, perhaps the most essential and least visible foundation of good schooling. Education functions not merely through curricula and infrastructure, but also through a shared understanding that educators act in students’ best interests. Replace that understanding with a contractual mindset, and the relationship between parents and schools becomes adversarial by default. The damage this inflicts on teacher morale, on classroom culture, and ultimately on the quality of learning itself is enormous.
The principal is careful to note that this is not the whole picture. Many parents continue to engage with schools in a spirit of genuine respect and partnership, articulating concerns while acknowledging professional expertise. These interactions point to a workable and necessary alternative: one in which accountability and trust coexist rather than undermine each other, and in which disagreement does not default to confrontation.
The answer, therefore, is not to diminish parental involvement. Engaged parents matter, and their concerns deserve to be heard seriously. But the terms of that engagement need reframing.
Education is not a refund model. Outcomes cannot be guaranteed, and dissatisfaction cannot always be redressed solely through institutional compliance. What is needed is a renewed social compact, one where schools communicate openly while firmly maintaining professional autonomy, and where parents remain meaningfully involved without seeking to control every variable in a child’s development.
That compact is dependent on honesty from both sides. Schools must earn trust through genuine transparency, not defensive or performative communication. Parents must accept that not everything about a child’s growth can be monitored, measured, or optimised on demand. Some of the most important things education does are invisible, slow, and impossible to capture in a report card or a parent-teacher meeting. Ultimately, this is not merely a question of parental behaviour or institutional policy. It is a question about the kind of educational culture being collectively produced. If schools are treated as service providers and teachers as customer care executives, the result may well be highly managed children. But the more fundamental task of raising independent, resilient, and genuinely curious learners risks being lost entirely in the process. The classroom is not a marketplace. And education, to remain transformative, must transcend mere transaction.
The writer is retired professor and former dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Christ University in Bengaluru
