Why is failure in exams considered a case for suicide?
Why is failure in exams considered a case for suicide?
A tenth standard failed student had been convinced by his family to go for tuition classes to ensure that he passes the exams in the next term. On his way back from the tuition centre, the student encounters some of his earlier mates. On his return home, unable to bear the pressure of having failed, the boy consumes a bottle of chemical pesticide that his father has stocked up for usage in the field. The nurse in the local hospital who performs the autopsy on him is also the same who delivered the boy not so many years ago. This is one of the 30 cases of attempted suicide because of SSLC failure from the town of Perunthurai in West Tamilnadu.
This trend is not limited to Perunthurai, there was a spate of reported suicides in the days after the exam results were announced in the local newspapers across tamilnadu. Any society that promotes suicide as the only option for a person so young is an ill society. The society has so far gone into pushing its students into a conveyor belt system of education, that not being part of the conveyor belt is enough reason for the students to take their lives.
The pressure starts with the parents, at a young age when the student is just about getting used to the prison ways of the school – the parents start pounding the student to rank higher and higher till there is no one ahead of them and then on to look out that some may catch up with them. Then comes the peer pressure for the parent, the need to say in a socializing conversation, “my son / daughter is always first in the class” is far more important than to understand as to what their child has to go through for getting that first rank. Added to this is the parental pressure of modern times to make their children multi-talented, that is talented in all those areas which the parent fancies for himself / herself and did not have an opportunity to pursue. If a student expresses inability to achieve these aspirations of the parents, it is interpreted as an illness. The modern medicine and its practitioners have come up with various kinds of names for these inabilities. The easy availability of such medical practitioners and medicinal terms has ensured that the parent’s are subjected to additional pressure to get their ‘average’ child medically examined. Any student with average scores in exams today is considered as an ill person by such ‘knowledgeable’ parents.
The association with the factory schools is no less taunting for the unfortunate student. The pressure of expectation from the parents also gets transformed into performance criteria for teachers in many schools. The more the parents are made to pay by the management, the more they demand their child’s performance improve, after all they are paying for it. Such reduction of the teaching profession into that of maintaining the conveyor belt has ensured that many a teachers with talent leave the profession. ‘No teacher with self-respect can be part of the current schooling system’, says Dr. Claude Alvares who is part of a network that facilitates a process through which many students have willingly ‘walked out’ of the factory schooling system. ‘The entire air was suffocating, I had no choice but to leave’, says a teacher of many years who was repeatedly reprimanded by her managements for her attempts to get the students to think in class and not just rote. The pressure on the teachers is transferred to the students as continuous assignments, impossible deadlines, exercises and exams that sucks the playtime out of their day and reduces them to mere automatons programmed to be part of the conveyor belt. The parents contribute money for the conveyor belt, the teachers their time, the management of schools the infrastructure and the text book societies, the curriculum.
The curriculum that people mug through till they reach their SSLC is nothing short of learning for surviving in a larger conveyor belt once the studies at the school level are over. The curriculum limits the students in terms of their options, shrinks their world to a few things and deprives them of all the understanding and sentiment that would bind them to anything other than the conveyor belt.
Essentially, the student is caught in the nexus of parent-teacher-school management-curriculum that deprives them of every opportunity to develop any individuality and cripples their thinking, limits them to the conveyor belt.
The values promoted by this nexus are competition, performance, standardization, imitation and stop questioning. Every student who is pushed to commit suicide is a victim of this nexus. Unless each component of nexus is recognized for its vileness and is debased and dismantled by the larger society, the young lives will continue to be sacrificed at the altar of the most wicked God of our times – factory schooling.
24th June 2006
A tenth standard failed student had been convinced by his family to go for tuition classes to ensure that he passes the exams in the next term. On his way back from the tuition centre, the student encounters some of his earlier mates. On his return home, unable to bear the pressure of having failed, the boy consumes a bottle of chemical pesticide that his father has stocked up for usage in the field. The nurse in the local hospital who performs the autopsy on him is also the same who delivered the boy not so many years ago. This is one of the 30 cases of attempted suicide because of SSLC failure from the town of Perunthurai in West Tamilnadu.
This trend is not limited to Perunthurai, there was a spate of reported suicides in the days after the exam results were announced in the local newspapers across tamilnadu. Any society that promotes suicide as the only option for a person so young is an ill society. The society has so far gone into pushing its students into a conveyor belt system of education, that not being part of the conveyor belt is enough reason for the students to take their lives.
The pressure starts with the parents, at a young age when the student is just about getting used to the prison ways of the school – the parents start pounding the student to rank higher and higher till there is no one ahead of them and then on to look out that some may catch up with them. Then comes the peer pressure for the parent, the need to say in a socializing conversation, “my son / daughter is always first in the class” is far more important than to understand as to what their child has to go through for getting that first rank. Added to this is the parental pressure of modern times to make their children multi-talented, that is talented in all those areas which the parent fancies for himself / herself and did not have an opportunity to pursue. If a student expresses inability to achieve these aspirations of the parents, it is interpreted as an illness. The modern medicine and its practitioners have come up with various kinds of names for these inabilities. The easy availability of such medical practitioners and medicinal terms has ensured that the parent’s are subjected to additional pressure to get their ‘average’ child medically examined. Any student with average scores in exams today is considered as an ill person by such ‘knowledgeable’ parents.
The association with the factory schools is no less taunting for the unfortunate student. The pressure of expectation from the parents also gets transformed into performance criteria for teachers in many schools. The more the parents are made to pay by the management, the more they demand their child’s performance improve, after all they are paying for it. Such reduction of the teaching profession into that of maintaining the conveyor belt has ensured that many a teachers with talent leave the profession. ‘No teacher with self-respect can be part of the current schooling system’, says Dr. Claude Alvares who is part of a network that facilitates a process through which many students have willingly ‘walked out’ of the factory schooling system. ‘The entire air was suffocating, I had no choice but to leave’, says a teacher of many years who was repeatedly reprimanded by her managements for her attempts to get the students to think in class and not just rote. The pressure on the teachers is transferred to the students as continuous assignments, impossible deadlines, exercises and exams that sucks the playtime out of their day and reduces them to mere automatons programmed to be part of the conveyor belt. The parents contribute money for the conveyor belt, the teachers their time, the management of schools the infrastructure and the text book societies, the curriculum.
The curriculum that people mug through till they reach their SSLC is nothing short of learning for surviving in a larger conveyor belt once the studies at the school level are over. The curriculum limits the students in terms of their options, shrinks their world to a few things and deprives them of all the understanding and sentiment that would bind them to anything other than the conveyor belt.
Essentially, the student is caught in the nexus of parent-teacher-school management-curriculum that deprives them of every opportunity to develop any individuality and cripples their thinking, limits them to the conveyor belt.
The values promoted by this nexus are competition, performance, standardization, imitation and stop questioning. Every student who is pushed to commit suicide is a victim of this nexus. Unless each component of nexus is recognized for its vileness and is debased and dismantled by the larger society, the young lives will continue to be sacrificed at the altar of the most wicked God of our times – factory schooling.
24th June 2006
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