By Aditya Raj
For a long time, the way we measured a good school was fairly uncomplicated. Board results. College admissions. Academic performance. Parents chose schools based on those metrics, students were coached around them, and everyone understood the game they were playing.
That game, for many families, is starting to feel inadequate.
Increasingly, students coming out of even strong academic institutions are arriving at the next stage of life undersupplied in certain crucial ways. They struggle to speak in a room. They find it hard to handle setbacks. They have not had much practice making decisions, leading people or simply figuring out who they are outside a classroom. Employers notice it. Faculty at colleges notice it. Parents, in retrospect, often notice it too.
The question this has put in front of schools is an uncomfortable one. Are we preparing children for exams or for life?
Tula’s International School in Dehradun has been grappling with that question seriously. A CBSE-affiliated co-educational residential school, TIS has built its educational approach around the belief that academic excellence and personal development are not competing priorities. When done well, they are the same thing.
The research on this has been fairly consistent for years. What actually predicts how well a person does across adult life — in careers, in relationships, in the ability to handle difficulty — is not primarily academic grades. It is things like self-awareness, resilience, communication, the ability to collaborate and emotional regulation. These are learnable. But they are not taught through textbooks. They develop through experience, through challenge, through being trusted with responsibility, and occasionally getting it wrong.
This is one of the reasons a residential school environment can offer something a day school simply cannot replicate. When you live alongside your peers, navigate conflict, share space, take on leadership roles within your community and learn to be away from home, you are acquiring something no curriculum can fully engineer. Life happens on a residential campus in ways that shape character quietly and continuously.
TIS takes that seriously. Alongside its academic programme, the school has invested in giving students genuine opportunities to lead, perform, compete and contribute. Sports are not treated as recreation between the real work of studying. Student responsibility is not symbolic. These things are seen as part of how the school does what it is supposed to do.
There is also an honesty at TIS about what today’s children are actually dealing with.
Growing up with social media, with the weight of comparison, with uncertainty about what the future looks like and what they are supposed to be working toward — this generation carries a different kind of pressure than the one before it. Schools that respond to this only with more academic rigour are missing something important. What many students need, alongside good teaching, is a place where they feel known, supported and safe enough to grow at their own pace.
Mentorship matters enormously in this context. The advantage a residential school has is that the relationship between students and educators does not end at the classroom door. A teacher who has seen a student at their most uncertain, most frustrated, most genuinely struggling can support them in ways that a class-period interaction rarely allows. That continuity of care is something TIS has tried to make central to how it operates.
Parents choosing schools are asking different questions now than they were a decade ago. They still care about academics, of course, but the conversation has broadened. Will my child be confident? Will they know how to handle failure? Will they be able to speak, lead, and connect with people? Will they leave school knowing themselves a little better than when they arrived?
These are not easy things to deliver on. But they are the right things to be trying to deliver on, and TIS is among the schools in India genuinely trying.
The most important lessons a school can give a child are probably not in any syllabus. They are the ones who teach a person how to show up for themselves and for others. Schools that understand that, and build themselves around it, are the ones that will matter most in the years ahead.
About Tula’s International School
Tula’s International School (TIS) is a CBSE-affiliated co-educational residential school in Dehradun, focused on holistic development alongside academic excellence. TIS is part of the broader Tulas Group, which includes Tula’s Institute, a NAAC A+ accredited institution established in 2006 under the Rishabh Educational Trust, offering programmes across engineering, management, commerce, journalism, agriculture and pharmacy to students from over 25 states across India.
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