Bringing Together Young India

All the students who have been abused in the name of education must all rise and call it the #HitMeToo movement, for the purpose of raising awareness among parents and children about mental and physical harm that can be caused in schools/colleges. Every time I see a news story about student suicide, I'm so sad as to how all of us in a highly self aware society still allow such inhumane and barbaric ways of "teaching".

I think that's because we got our priorities all wrong, where Money is valued more than Family, Careers more than children, Profits more than Propriety. Clueless kids are simply trying to make their loved ones happy.

Unironically (also consistent with changes in society), the children without particular attachment to the family/parents seem, to me, to sail through, the 16 or 17 years of education horror, unscathed. Unfortunately for those with greater attachment to Family members, are expected to endure the hardships.

There are no shortcuts. Either we teach our children family values and they are predestined to a life of hardships or teach them to leave the family behind and they can have a cake walk of a life; because they won’t value family values they can’t appreciate a family and therefore won’t have one. Does it sound too serious?! In my humble opinion, teaching family values is perhaps the most important part of any child's Education.

But this is the difficult choice we arrive at. What is the correct path: 1, Life with hardships, but with Family 2, Life without hardships but no Family - a true horror.

Either way, there are no shortcuts. 1. Enrollment into a particular school 2. Spending huge sums of money on education 3. Moving to a different city or country for a better education 4. Etc, etc. None of these are shortcuts, because there are none.

The child, I think, whether we choose to believe or not, will be making the choices that he feels are his best options. We just have to make sure that that choice isn't made based on utterly worthless Marks on a sheet. I urge parents and teachers to have a proper and balanced approach while setting expectations. A composed, balanced and happy child who can read, write, understand others, do basic math and can independently hone his/her analytical skills based on changing circumstances, in my opinion, is a decent outcome.

In putting pressure on performance and test scores, we think we are doing what’s best for the child and in doing so, may be inadvertently pushing the child in the wrong direction.

I’m speaking for myself here, but let’s be honest with ourselves and recognize that we do not really use more than 95% percent of what we study anyway. And frankly a lot of us have jobs that have nothing to do with what we studied. Children will be fine because we the parents and family will always be by their side even when they don’t need us.

This, perceivedly strange behavior, of being with each other through happiness and the sad - through good and the bad - through exciting and the boring, contrary to popular belief, is also a Family Value which seems to be getting lost in translation in the ongoing conversation between the older and the newer generations.

If there seems to be a heavy reliance on the Family & Parents in the above comments, it is because it is they who stand to lose the most when something unfortunate occurs to the young ones. The loss can be so heavy that at times it can take several generations to recover from it.