BEYOND BOARD EXAMS:

SUCCESS IN LIFE DOESN’T HINGE ON YOUR MARKSHEET

That is how essence of the special report on page 8 of TOI of 1 March 09 appears on the front page. How can such an insensitive blurb appear on front page  just before the start of the Class X & XII Board exams? Such an article is likely to act as a dampener to the students who have been conditioned since childhood to learn that ‘marks’ are the indices of success. This understanding is ubiquitous amongst all and sundry be it heads of institutions, teachers, parents, relatives, ever inquisitive neighbors, cousins including country cousins, shop keepers, Vikramwallas, maids, friends and anyone else within or outside the country.

Having been a part of the society and the system for decades, I was unable to understand the logic of putting such an objectionable headline on front page of a famous paper like TOI. In fact it is nothing short of an act of blasphemy with serious consequences as it would create a lot of confusion amongst students just before the exams. How to undo the damage so that students remain focused got me thinking.

Flipping through the pages I opened page 8 to pick holes on the Special Report to seek heavy compensation through legal action. While reading the report realization dawned that my perception, shaped over so many years of experience, needed correction as it was not based on facts. Points that impacted me to do a paradigm shift are reproduced as excerpts of that well researched article.

Excerpts. “You don’t need the calendar to flip from February into March to tell you it’s board exam time. Newspaper headlines are enough. CBSE help lines ring off the hook; parents report panic attacks. The worst stories are the suicides. In Junagadh district, two seventeen-year-olds decided to end it all rather than face Class XII exams. A Jharkhand girl set herself on fire after she failed to clear her Class X pre-board exams. These young people were so scared of exam failure they didn’t give life a chance. They were so worried about numbers on a mark sheet; they reduced themselves to a suicide statistic. It is an alarming statistic. More than 5,857 students killed themselves in 2006-2007, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which is yet to release figures for 2008. That boils down to a whopping 16 suicides a day, most of them caused by exam stress and inability to cope with disappointment.

“The sense of failure comes from the perception that success in exams is the key to success in life,” says Geetanjali Kumar, a CBSE counselor. “The burden of expectations — their own and their parents — makes them feel that only coming first is good enough.” Failure can even spur success. Thomas Edison famously told a reporter who asked him how it felt to have failed 700 times to invent the electric light. “I have not failed 700 times…I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work.”

Educationists say that most children struggle to cope with parental pressure. The phrase coined by psychologists is helicopter parents — hovering busily over every aspect of their kids’ lives, doing their homework and absorbing their every achievement as their own.

Pervin Sharma, whose career counseling sessions are very popular in Delhi, says it is the adults who need the most counseling. “Parents come and say that ‘mera bachcha to bada average hai’. This sort of statement can do a lot of damage since an adolescent’s sense of self worth is very fragile.”

Mahesh Murthy, who dropped out of engineering college in Hyderabad after three semesters because “it wasn’t remotely interesting.” Today, the 43-year-old says, “I was brought up to believe that there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I now believe that the rainbow is the pot of gold. All that we have is the journey.” It’s been an interesting one for Murthy who went from selling vacuum cleaners door to door to the successful venture capitalist that he is today. His advice to students: “Forget about topping class. Toppers don’t end up anywhere important in life.” If Murthy dropped out of the education system, Rajat Banerji and his wife Dola decided they wanted schooling without its pressures for their daughter. “The school system treats all kids uniformly regardless of their inclinations,” says Banerji who, along with his wife, home schools their seven-year-old”.
Examples of Famous Personlities without any Academic Profile as Modified by me

1. Spiritual Leaders. Jesus Christ, Guru Nanak, 1^st Guru of Sikhs; Kabir, famous sage; Ramkrishna Paramahans, Guru of Swami Vivekananda…..

2. Akbar the Great. Greatest of the great Moghuls couldn’t even write his name. And the empire was none the worse for it.

3. Abraham Lincoln. Born in Kentucky log cabin to impoverished parents, his formal schooling lasted 18 months. “When I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write and cipher….. but that was all,” he wrote of his early days. Largely self-taught, he joined politics before becoming a lawyer.

4. Gabriel ‘Coco’ Chanel. Brought up in an orphanage, she trained as a seamstress. The only fashion designer to be named Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of the 20^th century.

5. Thomas Edison. His official schooling ended when the teacher described him as addled; was home-schooled by his mother.

6. Walt Disney. Dropped out of high school at 16 to join army, but was rejected for being under-age. Began his artistic career after stint with Red Cross; won 26 Oscars and 7 Emmys.

7. The Geeks. Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs….

8. The Writers. Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw…

9. AR Rehman. Studied till class XI; later took his Trinity School of Music exams and went on fellowship to Cambridge.

10. Sachin Tendulkar. He scraped through Class X but left Class XI halfway as the runs piled up. Do you really want to know his math score? 

Liz Beattle, retired Primary School Teacher after serving for 37 years in UK, feels convinced that the word ‘Failure’ should be replaced with ‘deferred success’ as children’s aspirations to learn are crushed as soon as they are deemed failures (TOI  01 Mar 2009). Although this has generated controversy since 2005, the perception has merit as many world renowned personalities have made historical contribution despite repeated failures .

It is, therefore, for each one of us to think whether one needs to go by majority perception or facts regarding the relevance of marks as the index of success!

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Should one have expectations from friends? This is the subject of an animated group discussion among a bunch of teenagers, at the Doon Youth

Centre, located in the heart of Dehradun, off Rajpur Road. The discussion is being moderated by Ken McRae – a tall bright-eyed Canadian, who has made India his home since the last three decades. Incidentally, the centre – a place where youngsters can come, share their problems and try to arrive at solutions – is the latest among a series of projects that McRae has been involved in, since he came to India.

But, to begin his story from the beginning, McRae was a restaurant manager working in Toronto when he decided to take a break and travel the world. It was the 1970s – the time of the backpacking hippies – a young McRae soon joined their ranks and backpacked around the world for three years. In 1974, while he was in India, he had, as he puts it, a major life-changing moment. A missionary doctor – who was planning to go to inaccessible villages near Dehradun to provide medical aid to villagers – wanted volunteers. McRae joined him. As he started working with the doctor, he realized that there was great joy in doing something for other people. “All my life, I had been a self-centred person. I now found that there was greater satisfaction in giving,” he recollects.

Soon, McRae relocated to India and began working with orphans. For many years, he ran a school near Mussoorie for orphan village kids. In the late ’90s however, another incident happened that changed the direction of his work. The incident was the suicide of four youngsters – aged between 16 to 20 – all of whom belonged to upper middle class families and lived in an affluent locality in Dehradun. “These suicides made me realise the kind of apathy our society showed towards the problems faced by kids, irrespective of their socio-economic background,” says McRae. This incident also became an impetus for him to probe the problems that made youngsters take the extreme step of ending their lives and resulted in the formation of the Doon Youth Centre.

“The centre has been positioned not just as a counselling centre, but as a place where the youth can hang out,” says McRae. Accordingly, it has a variety of indoor games like table tennis, chess, carrom etc as well as a small library. “The objective is to create an informal and friendly atmosphere, where youngsters can work out problems through discussions with their peers as well as mentors,” says McRae.

Incidentally, all the services in the centre are free, with the rent for the premises as well as overheads being paid for by McRae and his family through the workshops that they conduct at various schools. McRae has an interesting explanation on why they have kept no charges at the centre. “The feedback that most kids gave us was that if services were not free, their parents wouldn’t allow them to come. Instead, they’ll ask them – why go to a centre to talk; why not talk to us?”

What most parents don’t realise, says Mc Rae, is that today’s youngsters grapple with a lot of issues -moral, psychological as well as academic. “The core problem in our society is that the value of a child is seen in accordance with the marks that he or she gets,” he says. “When a kid is not stressed about peer pressure or other growing up issues, academics fall into place. But all we do is expect results from them.”

Although McRae and his family have been keeping alive their work with youngsters with their own resources for many years now, they are beginning to feel a funds crunch. “I would like to open more youth centres where there are multiple activities since there is currently a huge shortage of places where kids can go. But right now, I find it difficult to even pay rent for this centre,” he says.

Perhaps it’s time our society realises the need to support the work of individuals like McRae. For, as the saying goes: ‘Only if we understand youth today, can we hope to empower them tomorrow’.

Original article can be found here

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