Respect a child’s aptitude, not marks

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin once said, a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic. What’s happening in the city is certainly a silent calamity: Mumbai is witnessing one blood-curdling suicide of a student almost everyday. 

The reason in some cases is not clear, but in most, the extreme step was triggered by tremendous academic pressure and parental expectations which the hapless teenagers could not match up to.

Necessarily, and I need to say this straight on the face, our education system, which is all about high grades and how big you are able to make it in life, is to blame.

When I say big, it is not an indication of your humaneness or large-heartedness, but how successful you are as a professional. In the same breath, I would like to emphasise that many parents here play an equally crucial role, unfortunately a negative one.

Few go on to understand what their children really want and what they are actually capable of. Most parents are attuned to the ways of the world and want to force their unrealised dreams on their children.

Few realise the results of such pressures. Stressed children show signs of emotional disabilities, aggressive behaviour, shyness, social phobia and lack of interest in activities that are otherwise enjoyable.

Research shows that children who are forced to live on prematurely adult levels can become oppositional to following their parents’ rules and eventually those of the society. Such children tend to respond to stress with aggression, which can and does trigger suicidal tendencies.

In the United States, teen suicide is the third leading cause of death for young people aged 15 to 24 and the fourth leading cause of death for persons aged between 10 and 14.

Studies have shown that boys commit suicide more often than girls do. But that’s immaterial. The trend is disturbing and needs to be stemmed.

You know, it all boils down to one factor: success. The mad rush to be successful is all too boggling for many. I remember reading an enormously delightful book Success Through Opposites by author N Muthuswamy, where he deals with success as part of an energy system and how “the same basic energy laws operating through us also decide our success.”

He emphasises that success is not as much an outcome of chance as we think. It is made or marred by the same fundamental laws of energy that govern all systems.

Particularly interesting is the fact that having known this basic fact all along, we have always overlooked it. The book throws questions like “Don’t we often wonder why most sincere efforts sometimes fail”? Why do some of our best efforts fail, while in other cases, success is achieved with relative ease? Why do some people with modest educational background achieve success, while those highly educated, do not?

The concept of success, let us all admit, is relative. What’s a benchmark of success for you may not be one for me. It’s in recognising and respecting what a child is capable of and letting him follow his heart alone that true success lies.

This, all academicians and parents should understand. These suicides not only involve loss of lives, but loss of respect for human values and capabilities as well.