Two 16-year-old girls die by suicide over exam results. Are we failing our students as a society?
Mohd Azhar
It was a chill winter air; snow was falling intensely. Green lights signalled for snow-clearance machines. A dark, overcast day with low ceilings predicted more. Occasionally, flakes of snow slid then fell from the branches of yonder poplar trees. The National Highway was closed, fragmented.
The next morning dawned. JKBOSE (as that agency governs our education system) declared their annual results; a high percentage was declared. Celebrations and fun filled every corner of social media, as portrayed. I was busy in a classroom (teaching a failing system) when my phone rang many times. When I picked up, there was a cry saying, “She died. She didn’t qualify. She hanged herself.”
From a frontier village, she was the eldest daughter (aged 16) of a poor household. Her father, Rashid Kak (name changed), in his 70s, was a mason by profession, labouring all through the day and night to bring up his daughters. Aaliya (name changed), his elder one, appeared in her annual examination. She did all that she could, but could not make it onto the qualifying list. She could not bear the societal burden of indoctrinated prejudice and being judged by numbers and a few ranks. She was a good girl: loyal, humble. But perhaps she could not fit herself into the definition of marks.
Another 16-year-old girl from the Shahpur Kotranka area of Rajouri district allegedly ended her life after learning that she had failed in one of the subjects of the Class 10 examination. She was also visibly stressed and upset with her results.
The question is: who assassinated those girls? Unequivocally, not her parents, not her father. Her father, his beard soaked with tears, could not do that. Her mother, grandmother, wailing, trembling with poor eyesight—they inevitably cannot do that. So who did?
For me, it is either a bigoted society or a prejudiced system. Such societies, on one hand, do not teach perseverance, and when you do not qualify, they do not accept failure. They treat them indifferently and make their world a living hell. The repercussions of this are frequently obvious when students of such a fate are engulfed by such an intimidating and horrendous society. The structure we live in teaches only to score and pass and puts them into a race in a meritocratic cosmos. We do not accept another status quo of the macrocosmic world: that sometimes you cannot pass. The system never teaches what if you fail, how to endure and pursue, or how to overcome failure. And this is the point where students usually baffle and ultimately rattle.
One set of data showed that, due to immense academic pressure and examination failure, around 13,000 students died by suicide in India in 2022. The student suicide rate in India is increasing by 4 per cent annually. That data also shows 586 cases in Jammu and Kashmir alone.
It is actually we people who fail. We fail as a whole. We fail as a society. We fail as teachers. We fail incessantly as responsible and sensible humans. We equate certain statistics with life’s worth. We over-chase the human. We are murderers as a whole.
Contemporary parents, whose whole aim is to see their children outperform others, cannot be absolved of the crime. They do not want to suffer the ignominy of seeing their wards fall short of the best, not realising that children have different adaptabilities, and for that reason, it is natural for them to score differently. It is not the score that matters, but what a child learns; that is important. The failure of the child to live up to the expectations of their parents develops in them anxiety, depression, and slowly a sort of retreat. The extra burden and the deprivation of freedom build stress. So it is no wonder that, under societal and parental pressure, many students commit suicide.
Another outcome of this menace is an outburst of drug addiction. When students are pushed to a limit, they end up with a certain addiction. Feelings of pressure to score, or failure, despondency, loneliness, and deprivation lead them to take refuge in drugs, destroying them physically and mentally, making their life a living hell.
Pressurising students to get higher grades for social status is a kind of oppression that needs to be realised by all concerned, and the mentality of overzealousness about our students has to be discarded. It is a hopeless situation in which we are trapped. We are going down into the abyss in a mad race. Scoring good marks may sometimes prove beneficial, but the way it has become a craze may manifest otherwise. Prioritising numbers and chasing figures can be lethally dangerous. Marks may be a by-product of quality education, but not its purpose. To become obsessed with marks proves vulnerable and fatal.
This is going to take us nowhere. We are losing the next generation to a faculty system which excels in nothing. We are not preparing our next generation for challenges. We weaponise qualifiers and victimise those who do not.
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