Hostel Life of Students
Some schools and colleges have the arrangements for hostels to accommodate the students. The students stay there is temporary detachment from their parents and relations.
Generally, a teacher remains in charge of the hostel as the superintendent. He has his family quarters in the hostel premises. He is the strict guardian of the boarders; and he is, even, their taskmaster in some respects.
The students are to pay for their board and lodging in addition to the tuition fees. Some schools and colleges are residential in arrangements. In such cases the students are to reside compulsorily in the school or in the college hostels. Day scholars are not allowed in such institutions.
The advantages and disadvantages of hostel life of students briefly given below:
Advantages of Hostel Life
Hostel life has great advantages for the students.
- It kills narrowness of mind.
- It broadens the mind, and makes a student fully accommodative in all circumstances of life.
- Students learn how to live together in perfect harmony and mutual cooperation.
- Self-help is the best help and the students here are automatically trained in the lessons in self-reliance.
- All the students are to abide by strict discipline.
- They cannot remain outside the hostel premises beyond some fixed hours.
- They are allotted time for sports, games and some other healthy diversions.
- The hours for study are, however, rigidly fixed.
Thus, the students learn regularity; and education, obtained in this way, becomes perfect.
The boarders of a hostel are as good as the members of one and undivided family. They have many and multifarious functions to perform. A boarder is elected the secretary; and he helps the superintendent to run the affairs smoothly. The players among the students organize the teams of football, cricket, volley-ball, badminton and table-tennis, etc. They hold annual social functions. They open hostel library for their own use. In such various ways they make their life at the hostel full of interests.
The hostel offers a congenial atmosphere for study. The hours for study are fixed. All the students are to prepare their lessons during the hours allotted for the purpose. The students of same class may discuss together a difficult topic of their syllabus. A student of brighter merit may, often, come to the benefit of others. All the students keep themselves inspired with the lone concern of building up a bright career for the future.
Disadvantages / Demerits of Hostel Life
The hostel life has its dark side also.
- From the very early stage of life the students are to live in detachment from their parents; and, thus they do not get enough time to live in intimacy with their brothers, sisters and other kins. Obviously, they cannot sometimes share the feelings and sentiments of others in the house with the warmth of love and sympathy.
- The most dreaded aspect of a hostel life is its instrument of ragging. Sometimes, the senior boarders tease the junior students. Such treatments are often carried to such excesses that the fresh boarders are put to both physical and mental tortures.
- A sizable section of the boarders in such hostels are freely but secretly using drugs and are getting themselves involved in different types of socially prohibited acts. The norms of discipline are being trampled under feet.