The existing educational mindset in society is dangerous for the students. Most often, parents and peer pressure decide what the young will learn. Thereafter, coaching institutions take charge and further dent students’ creativity
Suicides by young students in schools and colleges, sadly enough, are often taken as just ‘another another incident of death’. But each such case shatters the family and the nation is poorer in many ways. It is the responsibility of the generation in control to ensure the proper growing-up of the next generation. While politicians may take interest in specific cases for their own, often parochial, reasons, society must be conscious of its own larger responsibility.
As an exception, instances of suicides by two young teenagers reported from Kota, the ‘coaching capital’ of India, has led to widespread pain, hurt and anguish. Today, young boys and girls have before them a world of uncertain future, merciless competition, and a regime of exhausting tuitions and attendance in coaching classes.
Above all, in a majority of the cases, they have the lasting tension of fulfilling the ambitions imposed by the parents, and of ‘coming up’ to their ‘expectations’. Is it not indeed shocking that the young girl who committed suicide, had indeed successfully cleared the IIT-JEEIJ Even if she was not very high on the merit list, it must be considered a great achievement. But, apparently, she dreaded studying for another four years the subjects she did not like. This prospect unnerved her and led her to take the drastic tragic step.
In the second instance, the girl, it is reported, had urged the Union Minister for Human Resource Development to ban coaching institutions. Most of those who shift (or have shifted) to Kota, do so under pressures of varied hues. The globalised world believes in its own ideology of progress: Coaching has grown up as an industry, it has created jobs, and it is expanding fast.
Economists are calculating the volumes of turnover and annual growth rates, as they would do in case of any other industry like that of petroleum or textiles. So, only a few care for the consumer and most care to market forces and ensure that whatever they offer, sells, as there are so many takers.
Education, even beyond coaching institutions, is the safest sector for entrepreneurs at this stage; growth and dividends are assured. The ‘individual’ comes only as cog in the wheel as the ‘humane’ factor rarely finds a place when economics takes over.
Children are put to a series of disadvantages and pressures during their days in schools. Professionally inadequately-prepared teachers fail to provide guidance and motivation at crucial stages. Parental pressures normally arise out of their unfulfilled ambitions. They expect children achieve all that they themselves could not. This imposition is too big an impediment to be ignored in growing up. The irony of the situation reflects in increased parental insistence that it has to be their decision as to what the child should study, which competition he or she must clear! The parental pressures should also have reduced as most of those who are made to go to coaching institutions are from educated middle-class families.
The privately run prestigious ‘public schools’ could have contributed effectively in creating a consciousness amongst parents not to pressure children to study subjects of their disinterest or dislike. These schools, unfortunately, measure their success in the number of candidates who crack the many professional entrance examinations.
Is there no way outIJ It requires a broad understanding of the basic principles of learning and Indian philosophers in education have very clearly articulated how the child can be preparing to unearth the ‘treasure within’. It should be within the grasp of every parent and every teacher to realise the essence of the words of Sri Aurobindo: “There can be no greater error than for the parent to arrange beforehand that his son shall develop particular qualities, capacities, ideas, virtues, or be prepared for a prearranged career.
“To force the nature to abandon its own Dharma is to do it permanent harm, mutilate its growth and deface its perfection. It is a selfish tyranny over a human soul and a wound to the nation, which loses the benefit of the best that a man could have given and is forced to accept instead something imperfect and artificial, second rate, perfunctory and common. Everyone has in him something divine, something his own, a chance of perfection, and strength in however small a sphere which God offers him to take or refuse. The chief aim of education should be to help the growing soul to draw out that in itself is best and make it perfect for a noble cause.”
Children must get their childhood back. There inherent talents and interests must be nurtured to blossom fully. An attitudinal transformation is the pre-requisite to finding a tangible solution.